“... self, or everything but the self? Are absent-mindedness and present-mindedness the same things? As Augustine points out in the Confessions, memory is partly convincing yourself of what you knew all along; and the representation of consciousness, the speaking-aloud of consciousness, is a further redundant self-convincing. We are always forgetting things until ...”

“... admirers, who normally speak of his ‘pragmatism’, switch to a different register. They mention Augustine and Aquinas and say the president has been studying just-war theory. Yet the difference between moral right and political expedience is not overcome by a shift of gears from the most secular of philosophies to the most theologically saturated. By a more ...”

“... Antiquities, a work almost entirely lost to us but hugely influential in its time, which provided Augustine with some good material to bolster his argument that Romans had neglected the gods. The Antiquities was clearly intended to set out in relatively accessible form the recovery of essential knowledge about Rome’s beginnings and past, its topography, its ...”

“... On the Sublime is the most important work of ancient literary criticism between Aristotle and Augustine, served as tutor to the royal teenager. While the western empire, from Britain to the Balkans, remained threatened by invasion and was carved up among a series of competing emperors, Zenobia set about conquering the largest single kingdom the Greek ...”

“... and avoided his Great Books Discussion Group, which met each month ‘to chew over Plato, Augustine, Aquinas and other heavies’. But bibliotherapy seems to have sharpened the interest of other prisoners; San Quentin encouraged an implausible string of wannabe writers. Writing was a consolation; it was better than notching the walls, at least for ...”

“... staying with her parents by getting him drunk and showing him her stomach. ‘It’s like St Augustine always said,’ she tells him: ‘Oh God, don’t make me good, not ever.’ This kind of twinkling naughtiness can occasionally be hard work. (‘Betty Boop in a pas de deux with David Sedaris,’ Dwight Garner called Priestdaddy in the New York ...”

“... illiterate Scottish judge, not Harold Macmillan). As early as 1906, he had led a delegation to Augustine Birrell, the MP for Bristol North, requesting a scheme of public works to relieve unemployment. Birrell didn’t listen, but Bevin persuaded the city council to put men to work constructing a lake in Eastville Park, known for years afterwards as ...”

“... in Dublin who either found it convenient to believe in British justice or were, like St Augustine, seduced by the attractions of post-coital chastity. It was not until the following year that the bandwagon really got under way in Britain, with contributions by Yorkshire Television, Lords Devlin and Scarman, and Robert Kee. Irish public ...”

“... To attribute Providential significance to Roman history in this way necessarily set Vico against Augustine, to whom on other accounts he was keen to profess allegiance; as Lilla notes, however, Vico’s argument was squarely within the alternative Christian tradition of Eusebius, who had equated the pax Romana with the pax Christi as works of Providence. It ...”

“... the gift economy sounds like an incipient version of the hierarchical structures celebrated in Augustine and in Medieval political philosophy. Freed of commoditised thinking and of the anthropological straitjacket, she could find affinity and support for her radical re-analysis of the anthropological literature in alternative strands within the Western ...”

“... memoir written or dictated by Hildegard herself around 1170, marking her as the first saint since Augustine to be an auto-biographer. The obligatory miracles attached to this account afford glimpses into the popular piety of the age: we learn how the mayor’s wife eased her labour pangs by girding herself with a plait of the abbess’s hair, how Hildegard ...”

“... biography was out of the question, and such a thing is not clearly feasible for any person before Augustine. But if our evidence comes to a bundle of external impressions, these are, after all, extensive and varied, reflecting a long and bloody career covering four vital decades and many areas of the ancient world from Spain, Sicily and Africa to the ...”

“... made to seem, and the subsequent record is honourable. But the mental set remains. It is as though Augustine said that ‘objectively’ God hadn’t been ready for his chastity to begin with. Jefferson Davis was apparently not a good military leader and not a politician, but was ‘a gentleman’ and brave, and stuck to the rights of the state he ...”

“... far-flung corners of the body. The Church Fathers, particularly Nemesius, Bishop of Emesa, and St Augustine, contributed a mode of thought that still remains useful in modern discussion of the brain. They identified certain regions as allied with its particular functions. Although simplistic, theirs was an attitude that at least provided a framework for an ...”

“... serve as Simic’s down-at-heel stand-ins for the two thieves crucified with Christ, about whom Augustine famously taught: ‘Do not despair; one of the thieves was saved: do not presume; one of the thieves was damned.’ The sandwich-board derelicts introduce Simic’s characteristic fifty-fifty focus on earth-shattering catastrophe, on the one hand ...”