“... the enigmatic Secretum (‘The Secret’), framed as a dialogue between Petrarch and St Augustine; and the unfinished epic Africa, which finds a rousing example for Italian military resurgence in the story of the Roman general Scipio Africanus and his defeat of Hannibal. A later enthusiast of this poem was Machiavelli, who quoted from it in The ...”

“... and a treatise, De anima. These are highly conventional: the Expositio borrows mainly from St Augustine; De anima, immensely popular in the Middle Ages, is a trot through twelve untaxing questions about the soul, their vaguely Neoplatonist answers long since assimilated into Christian thinking. Yet it is De anima the announces the theme of the rest of ...”

“... state ideology’. If we think of Aristotle, the tutor to Alexander, rather than Socrates, say, or Augustine, we have an idea of the way the Confucians situated themselves. Scholars with practical advice to offer could change policy, if they were lucky enough not to be purged, but only at the cost of their intellectual independence. Those who stood on ...”

“... of the higher duty of saving one’s soul. It was possible for very learned men such as Augustine and Milton to condemn it; and it was sometimes stated in very repressive forms, as indeed it is in Paradise Regained. That Donne should have such an opinion even in a mild form was unacceptable to Empson because he would feel contempt for anybody who ...”

“... to the Edessene preacher and poet Bardaisan, who died in 222 AD. The book was known to St Augustine, who brusquely notes that it is ‘read by Manicheans’. It is a strange mix. High-flown gnostic poetry and propaganda are mingled with a mass of more picaresque material – miracles, magic, talking animals etc – written in an episodic, romance-like ...”

“... Haley and Malcolm exaggerated the latter’s sordid life of sin and crime to highlight, as St Augustine did, the luminous transformation eventually worked by God, or Allah. ‘An investigation of the NYPD’s arrest record for Malcolm Little,’ Marable writes, ‘failed to turn up any criminal charges or arrests.’ Perhaps this only means that Malcolm ...”

“... Augustan, American, Polish, Russian, Irish. Indeed, one of the most illuminating essays, by Augustine Martin, professor of Anglo-Irish Literature at University College, Dublin, shows in detail how Davie has made use of Irish metrics and themes, weaving variations and reversals quite invisible to the uninstructed eye. The sentiments of Yeats or of Austin ...”

“... Sean O’Sullivan who died of liquor and love and loneliness, English and Irish politicians like Augustine Birrell, Stephen Gwynn, Arthur Griffith, social stars, Lord and Lady Glenavy, Count Cassy Markievicz, the Countess, actors from the theatres, the Abbey, the National, the Celtic, the Hardwicke Street, the Little, the Trinity. You can see a couple of ...”

“... Refutation of Scepticism is the newest addition to a long line of proofs, from the Stoics to St Augustine, from Descartes to Kant, from Moore to Carnap. As such, it inevitably brings to mind Nietzsche’s view that ‘it is certainly not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable; it is precisely thereby that it attracts subtler minds.’ But can ...”

“... substantial for a layman, bolstered as it was by reading in the Fathers, especially his favourite Augustine, and Cyprian, a doughty defender of the Church, and perhaps by aid from Fisher. He was also familiar with heretical doctrine from being present at interrogations. Later, he knew the work of Tyndale, Luther’s great English mouthpiece. In ...”

“... HIM’, which is Gelpi quoting Pound on Eliot, and echoing the voice of God in Saint Augustine: Tolle lege, tolle lege). He describes Day Lewis’s quest as ‘the never-satisfied need of the “Churchy agnostic” ... to reach bedrock, to press toward realising (in the double sense of comprehending and fulfilling) human limits and human ...”

“... latest and most powerful legacy of the Christian tradition of introspection, opened up by Paul and Augustine … The modern contribution to this Christian sensibility has been to discover the making of works of art and the venture of sexual love as the two most exquisite sources of suffering. It is this that we look for in a writer’s diary. Sontag’s ...”

“... in the 1960s – the Second Piano Sonata, the Concerto for Orchestra and The Vision of Saint Augustine – retained the mosaic form of King Priam, while harmony became like putty in Tippett’s hands, morphing into weird and wonderful shapes.Reading the responses of Tippett’s fellow composers to his late works, I wonder if I am listening to the same ...”

“... familiar with Richard Ellmann’s biography of 1959 will be disappointed. Born in 1882, James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was the first surviving child of John and May Joyce, whose recent marriage had been fiercely opposed by both sets of parents. Their first baby, named after his father, had died at barely two months. The first healthy son was crucial ...”

“... as his mother lay dying, moves between reflections on circumcision, death and St Augustine, and an elegiac remembrance of his childhood. His real ambition, Peeters suggests, was to be a poet or novelist; towards the end of his life, he spoke less of his philosophical legacy than of his desire to leave ‘traces in the history of the French ...”