“... 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 ...”

“... to renew God’s covenant with man. So the Jewish revelation, while superseded, is authentic. For Augustine, this was a reason not to slaughter the Jews. Although as enemies of God they had no right to exist, they bore witness to the truth of the prophetic texts. And their misery was living proof that God had replaced the old covenant with a new one. In this ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was positioned at a slight angle to reflect and refract the light.6 He was fond of quoting St Augustine – ‘beauty is the radiance of truth’ – and wanted to celebrate rather than disguise structural form. ‘Only skyscrapers under construction reveal the bold constructive thoughts,’ Mies wrote, ‘and then the impression of the high-reaching ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... an unexpected understanding of Wittgenstein’s perception, in Philosophical Investigations, that Augustine, as characteristic of philosophers, ‘describes the learning of language as if the child came into a strange country and did not understand the language of the country; that is as if it already had a language, only not this one’. This is ...”

“... believe that Nero is still living.’ Three hundred years later, in the time of Jerome and Augustine, stories were still going around that Nero was alive and ready at any time to make a reappearance. At this late date, however, there was much more involved in Nero’s nachleben than the prospect of a comeback concert tour. The tyrant’s return had ...”

“... Adams’s more reticent memoir. The Education, although written in the confessional vein of Augustine and Rousseau, blotted out – Adams was more voyeur than stripper – as much as it revealed about its subject. He described it as a meditation on ‘the direction, tendency or history of the human mind, not as a religion, but as fact’. But it has ...”