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“... 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 ...”

“... uncovenanted transcendental interventions surely indicates a high degree of egotism, but then St Augustine was, on that criterion, a supreme egotist, though that isn’t the first thing one wants to say about him. Plainly there is an analogy between these epiphanic experiences and the experience of falling in love; indeed Russell was clearly conscious of ...”

“... famous Annunciation in the Venetian church of San Salvatore, which was painted for an altar of St Augustine. Because Gregory the Great’s defence of paintings was specifically concerned with stories, the idea that altarpieces were intended as a means of instruction can have been directly relevant only to relatively few of them, such as the series of four ...”

“... continued to be invoked for centuries by those probing the dilemmas of sexual assault, from St Augustine to any number of 17th-century English moralists. In Livy’s account, in the late sixth century, Tarquin, a member of the Roman royal family, set out to rape the virtuous Lucretia, the wife of a leading citizen. She at first resisted, but in the face of ...”

“... Why can​ the dead do such great things? Augustine’s rhetorical question, posed near the end of The City of God, launches Robert Bartlett’s massive, erudite compendium of saint lore. Bartlett never cites the bishop’s answer, which is that feats performed from beyond the grave vindicate faith in the resurrection ...”