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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... would be logical, but damaged families are not great on logic. In his epigraph, Burnside quotes St Augustine: ‘Where, during all these years, was my free will?’ His own slide to near oblivion has an air of inevitability – binge-drinking and drugs, with barbiturates a particularly obliterating favourite: ecstasies of self-hatred and self-neglect; lost ...”

“... of comrades’ in the epigraph to the first half of his novel; for the second half, he quotes St Augustine’s mournful remark from the Confessions about the death of his nameless friend (though he omits the initial clause in which Augustine imagines God in hot pursuit of the two ‘fugitives’, thanks him for killing 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the religion of the Incarnation, of the loving Creator who humiliated himself on the cross. Augustine said that he had read much about the Logos in the Platonists, but that the Logos was made flesh and dwelt among us he never found in the writings of the Greeks. Fish can be a brilliant, stylish critic. In this book he writes admirably on, for ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... recommended: among the Latins Cyprian appeared in 1520, Arnobius followed in 1522, Hilary in 1524, Augustine (less his favourite than some) in 1529; among the Greeks were John Chrysostom in 1527, Basil the Great in 1532 and Origen (his great hero), published after Erasmus’s death in 1536. He made yet more collections of the Epistolae, by which he moulded ...”

“... is buried in the bodies of the worlds they create. ‘I do not comprehend all that I am,’ St Augustine wrote, and he followed this declaration with the question: ‘Is the mind, therefore, too limited to possess itself?’ Eudora Welty conveys self-possession by self-dispersal, not by consciously, or even unconsciously, concocting an instantly ...”

“... learned than I am) I trace this doctrine, not to the 17th century, but rather further back – to Augustine, for example. This doctrine may well have become a ‘commonplace’ by the 13th century: indeed, Croce supposes Vico to have derived it from Aquinas, and, then again, perhaps from Sanchez three centuries later; Vico evidently did not need the famous ...”

“... existed, even if in isolation. It led her to some sweeping conclusions. In her biography of St Augustine (1933) she rightly describes as ugly and cruel the way in which the future saint’s mistress was sent packing after a long and apparently happy relationship, but she insists on hoping for the best: ‘After fourteen years of companionship with a ...”