UK Law

John Horgan, 16 August 1990

Stolen Years: Before and After Guildford 
by Paul Hill and Ronan Bennett.
Doubleday, 287 pp., £12.99, June 1990, 0 385 40125 6
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Proved Innocent 
by Gerry Conlon.
Hamish Hamilton, 234 pp., £12.99, June 1990, 0 241 13065 4
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Cage Eleven 
by Gerry Adams.
Brandon, 156 pp., £4.95, June 1990, 0 86322 114 9
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The Poisoned Tree: The untold truth about the Police conspiracy to discredit John Stalker and destroy me 
by Kevin Taylor and Keith Mumby.
Sidgwick, 219 pp., £15, May 1990, 0 283 06056 5
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... 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 ...

History Man

John Robertson, 4 November 1993

G.B. Vico: The Making of an Anti-Modern 
by Mark Lilla.
Harvard, 225 pp., £29.95, April 1993, 0 674 33962 2
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The Rehabilitation of Myth: Vico’s ‘New Science’ 
by Joseph Mali.
Cambridge, 275 pp., £35, September 1992, 0 521 41952 2
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... 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 ...

A Gentle Deconstruction

Mary Douglas, 4 May 1989

The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia 
by Marilyn Strathern.
California, 422 pp., $40, December 1988, 0 520 06423 2
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... 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 ...

No soul, and not special

P.W. Atkins, 21 May 1987

Neuronal Man: The Biology of Mind 
by Jean-Pierre Changeux, translated by Laurence Garey.
Oxford, 348 pp., £17.50, February 1987, 0 19 504226 3
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... 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 ...

Save it for HBO

Jenny Diski: Stanley Fish and ‘The Fugitive’, 17 March 2011

The Fugitive in Flight: Faith, Liberalism and Law in a Classic TV Show 
by Stanley Fish.
Pennsylvania, 152 pp., £16.50, November 2010, 978 0 8122 4277 5
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... levels. Harrison Ford There’s no mention in the film, as there is in the Fish essay, of St Augustine, or the Johns: Milton and Rawls. Or of Isaiah Berlin’s view that ‘true liberty … consists in self-direction’ or of the ‘relation between faith as a guarantor of knowledge and knowledge provided by empirical inspection’. Nor does Harrison ...

The Greer Method

Mary Beard, 24 October 2019

On Rape 
by Germaine Greer.
Bloomsbury, 96 pp., £12.99, September 2018, 978 1 5266 0840 6
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... 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 ...

Snakes and Leeches

Rosemary Hill: The Great Stink, 4 January 2018

One Hot Summer: Dickens, Darwin, Disraeli and the Great Stink of 1858 
by Rosemary Ashton.
Yale, 352 pp., £25, July 2017, 978 0 300 22726 0
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... family beachcombing, gathering shells and driftwood on the Kent coast, close to the spot where St Augustine landed, bringing Christianity to England. Behind the small figures the chalk cliffs rise in testament to the fossil record, the ‘millions upon millions’ of years of geological time. Overhead Donati’s comet passes. The smallness of humanity in the ...

Giving Hysteria a Bad Name

Jenny Diski: At home with the Mellys, 17 November 2005

Take a Girl like Me: Life with George 
by Diana Melly.
Chatto, 280 pp., £14.99, July 2005, 0 7011 7906 6
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Slowing Down 
by George Melly.
Viking, 221 pp., £17.99, October 2005, 0 670 91409 6
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... revealing to the world the true nature of the author, who, somewhat in the manner of St Augustine, offers her behaviour and thoughtlessness naked and shorn of excuses as a public expression of her mature contrition and conversion; or it might simply be the old but effective autobiographical trick that al-Hujwiri cottoned on to of ostentatiously ...

Truffles for Potatoes

Ferdinand Mount: Little Rosebery, 22 September 2005

Rosebery: Statesman in Turmoil 
by Leo McKinstry.
Murray, 626 pp., £25, May 2005, 0 7195 5879 4
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... which never left the minds of the thousands who had queued for tickets to one of his set-pieces. Augustine Birrell added that ‘a certain nervousness of manner, that suggested at times the possibility of a breakdown, kept his audience in a flutter of nervousness and excitement.’ He might have been talking about Judy Garland.Some of his old friends found ...

Roman History in Chains

Fergus Millar, 19 June 1980

Romans and Aliens 
by J.P.V.D. Balsdon.
Duckworth, 310 pp., £18, August 1979, 0 7156 1043 0
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Pompey: A Political Biography 
by Robin Seager.
Blackwell, 209 pp., £12, August 1979, 0 631 10841 6
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The Gracchi 
by David Stockton.
Oxford, 251 pp., £9.50, October 1979, 0 19 872104 8
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Cicero: the Ascending Years 
by Thomas Mitchell.
Yale, 257 pp., £11, September 1979, 0 300 02277 8
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Clio’s Cosmetics: Three Studies in Greco-Roman Literature 
by T.P. Wiseman.
Leicester University Press, 209 pp., £13, November 1979, 0 7185 1165 4
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... 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 ...

Southern Comfort

Claude Rawson, 16 April 1981

Jefferson Davis gets his citizenship back 
by Robert Penn Warren.
Kentucky/Transatlantic Book Service, 114 pp., £4.85, December 1980, 0 8131 1445 4
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Being here: Poetry 1977-1980 
by Robert Penn Warren.
Secker, 109 pp., £4.95, October 1980, 0 436 36650 9
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Ways of light: Poems 1972-1980 
by Richard Eberhart.
Oxford, 68 pp., £5.95, January 1981, 9780195027372
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... 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 ...

Cheesespreadology

Ian Sansom, 7 March 1996

Garbage 
by A.R. Ammons.
Norton, 121 pp., £7.50, February 1995, 0 393 31203 8
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Tape for the Turn of the Year 
by A.R. Ammons.
Norton, 205 pp., £8.95, February 1995, 0 393 31204 6
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Red Sauce, Whiskey and Snow 
by August Kleinzahler.
Faber, 93 pp., £6.99, April 1995, 0 571 17431 0
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The Unemployed Fortune-Teller: Essays and Memoirs 
by Charles Simic.
Michigan, 127 pp., £30, January 1996, 0 472 06569 6
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Frightening Toys 
by Charles Simic.
Faber, 101 pp., £6.99, April 1995, 0 571 17399 3
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The Ghost of Eden 
by Chase Twichell.
Faber, 78 pp., £6.99, April 1995, 0 571 17434 5
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... 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 ...

Cad

Frank Kermode, 4 April 1996

Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude 
by Ray Monk.
Cape, 720 pp., £25, April 1996, 0 224 03026 4
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... 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 ...

Uppity Trumpet of the Living Light

Barbara Newman: Hildegard of Bingen, 20 January 2000

Secrets of God: Writings of Hildegard of Bingen 
edited by Sabina Flanagan.
Shambhala, 186 pp., £10.99, August 1998, 1 57062 164 0
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The Letters of Hildegard of Bingen: Vol. II 
translated by Joseph Baird.
Oxford, 215 pp., £36, October 1998, 0 19 512010 8
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Jutta and Hildegard: The Biographical Sources 
edited by Anna Silvas.
Pennsylvania State, 299 pp., £15.50, September 1998, 0 271 01954 9
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Physica 
by Hildegard of Bingen, translated by Priscilla Throop.
Healing Art, 250 pp., £19.99, August 1998, 0 89281 661 9
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On Natural Philosophy and Medicine 
by Hildegard of Bingen, translated by Margret Berger.
Brewer, 166 pp., £12.99, July 1999, 0 85991 551 4
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... 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 ...

What did her neighbours say when Gabriel had gone?

Hilary Mantel: The Virgin and I, 9 April 2009

Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary 
by Miri Rubin.
Allen Lane, 533 pp., £30, February 2009, 978 0 7139 9818 4
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... the opposite sex. The tension between her divine and her human nature is troubling and exquisite. Augustine said that Mary and Joseph were really married, but without ‘intercourse of the flesh’. If Jesus was divine, every aspect of his story had to accord with his divinity, and Mary’s life had to be worthy of him. Was she conceived without original ...