“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”