“... 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 ...”

“... one of the main distinctions between indigenes and incomers fell away. And after the start of Augustine of Canterbury’s mission in 597, the Church in Rome began clamping down on indigenous practices, such as the local appointment of bishops and alternative ways of celebrating Easter. British clergy were sidelined and British saints’ cults pronounced ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... first on the shrines and then on the legends of the saints, was allowed a certain latitude. As St Augustine wrote, ‘What we teach is one thing, what we tolerate another.’ The leaders of the Church, Kleinberg argues, ‘were ready to make many compromises with the “masses”, so long as these masses were not seeking to undermine the ...”

“... from Tarsus’ (what age group is this pitched at?); the ‘wily’ Emperor Constantine; and Augustine and Aquinas, with ‘their obsessed, twisted minds’. At last, after the benighted Middle Ages (‘another country, another world, and a distasteful one at that’), glimmers of reason start to shine through (‘all in all, Newton was a man of mixed ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that seeks it out in order to repress it. This ‘dynamic’ variety attracted, among others, Augustine and Virgil, whose Aeneas weeps and loves. There is an elegant and learned essay on the adunata topos, the catalogue of impossibilities. Nuttall has a special talent for extracting large significances from a single text; his characteristic move is to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... down. But if time is of the essence, what is the essence of time? ‘I know what time is,’ St Augustine said, ‘but if someone asks me, I cannot tell him.’ Physicists and philosophers have much the same problem: when pressed for time, they have no easy answer. Nor do historians. But they do have a powerful sense, if not of its nature, at least of its ...”

“... to be explained? This was the question with which the Fathers and apologists struggled. Following Augustine, the Church settled for a strictly qualified dualism, a theodicy that acknowledged both the reality of evil and the ultimate limitations imposed on it. (‘Diabology’ is not the happiest of neologisms: perhaps, with characteristic false modesty, the ...”

“... a view of the nature of man – even more, of woman – which has not changed since the days of St Augustine. Aldiss suggests that Lewis is trying ‘to answer the Wellsian position in vaguely Wellsian terms’, but this does not ring true. William Golding perhaps did that in Lord of the Flies (cp. Moreau), in The Inheritors (cp. ‘The Grisly Folk’), in ...”

“... and Bruno Schulz, and Will Self and Lars von Trier with Carrington and Anna Kavan, as well as St Augustine, Giordano Bruno, Philip K. Dick, Walt Disney and J.R.R. Tolkien. Her cast of ‘imagined puppets’ ranges from the entertainers in Ben Jonson’s Bartholemew Fair, through E.T.A. Hoffmann’s weird Olympia to Karel Capek’s robots, and such lower ...”

“... which more presently) has striking affinities with the metaphysical Realism of Aristotle and Augustine. True, we sometimes presuppose more logic than you’re likely to come across on the omnibus to Clapham. But I’m told that an intelligent reading of Heidegger requires knowing more about Kant, Hegel and the Pre-Socratics than I, for one, am eager to ...”

“... and an understanding of the processes and contours of piety, from his magnificent biography of Augustine of Hippo (1967) through to later explorations of Christian attitudes to sex, poverty and charity. An affectionate wit runs through it all: here there is a contrast with Gibbon, whose cold satirical scepticism suffused his learning in Christian ...”