“... books’ course. It began with Plato’s Republic and continued with the Bible, before going on to Augustine, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Smith and so on. There was, it seemed to me, little sign of contemporary civilisation. Fully occupied with delivering twice-weekly lectures on Europe from 1870 to 1919 and a weekly graduate class on imperial ...”

“... teacher and student that blurred the limits between them. In On Instructing Beginners in Faith, St Augustine advised a burned-out Carthaginian deacon, Deogratias, to cultivate a feeling of compassion ‘so strong that, when our listeners are touched by us as we speak and we are touched by them as they learn, each of us comes to dwell in the other’.In the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”