“... 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 ...”

“... not dealing in a universal currency, like Yeats’s Byzantium, Pound’s Cathay, Eliot’s Augustine and Lowell’s Ahab, to which we all (we’re told) have access.’ It’s a good point, and we need, as Celan says, to listen our way in with our mouths. But beyond the Jewish themes and buried history in the poems, there are other, more recalcitrant ...”

“... kinship had been created between them, and he often turned to that other great North African, St Augustine, who disliked buttoned-up Northerners and, as Todd points out, felt like a Greek in a Christian universe. Camus had a peculiar war – to a large extent he simply ignored it. He went to Paris in March 1940, worked on – though never wrote for – the ...”

“... reading Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, a ‘messianic’ poem from around 42 BCE interpreted by St Augustine as a prophecy of Jesus. So, like a man carrying a light behind his back, Virgil saves others though he himself is damned. Statius confesses that he kept his conversion secret out of fear, which explains why there is no record of it – and also why he ...”

“... Maltese’ refers to a painting in Venice by Carpaccio known as ‘The Vision of St Augustine’: the saint has just been informed by a miraculous voice of the death of St Jerome, to whom he was about to write a letter. To the left, bathed in celestial light, sits an alert and expectant Maltese dog, who seems to be asking of his astonished ...”

“... the leader of the cult is an intellectual and a systematiser, who studies Kierkegaard and St Augustine before turning to Manichaeanism in a desperate attempt to make sense of the horrific suffering he has experienced. ‘I wanted to find a place to start understanding everything,’ Frederica says of the dissertation on metaphor, and it is characteristic ...”

“... while having in fact abandoned any such belief. Some people think that men like St Paul and St Augustine are exemplary instances of what it is to possess the religious temperament. It’s easy enough to see why they have this reputation as long as we stick to the sociological understanding of religion: both were brilliant monsters of egotism, and almost ...”

“... short cuts. The Zaleskis may contend that his column in the Listener had the eloquence of St Augustine, but they are disinterested enough to quote Orwell’s withering verdict on Lewis’s ‘silly-clever’ argumentation and his patronising rhetoric, with its ‘homey little asides’: ‘The idea, of course, is to persuade the suspicious reader ...”

“... the ordinary book. One of the sequences in Men in the Off Hours runs a different quotation from St Augustine at the bottom of every page; the next has a ticker (as on a news channel) made up from quotations, in French, from Antonin Artaud. When I interviewed her ten years ago Carson suggested to me that she was losing interest in the separable poem, and in ...”

“... fretted much about solitary sex, but they had plenty else to worry about on the sexual front. From Augustine, who claimed that Adam covered his sexual organs because they moved without his consent; to centuries’ worth of divines excoriating adultery, homosexuality, and any sex that promised fun without penalties; to the author of Onania, for whom lust was a ...”

“... a staggering range of figures and topics: Thucydides, Aristotle, Lucian, Quintilian, Origen, St Augustine, Dante, Boccaccio, More, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Hobbes, Bayle, Voltaire, Sterne, Diderot, David, Stendhal, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Warburg, Proust, Kracauer, Picasso and many more, each an extraordinary display of learning. No other living historian ...”

“... in 1598 (during which Shakespeare, unamiably, hoarded malt), or Shakespeare’s retreat to Augustine Phillips’s house at Mortlake during the plague of 1603, or his involvement as an intermediary in the marriage negotiations between Mary Mountjoy, daughter of the French Protestant family with whom Shakespeare lodged near the Barbican in 1604, and ...”

“... She worked, curiously enough, on theology. Her dissertation concerned the concept of Love in St Augustine, and it is perhaps not too much to claim that she was, during the Twenties, not too far from conversion to the austere Protestantism of which Königsberg has been a citadel. The middle ground of philosophy, theology and history, on which both Max Weber ...”