“... 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 ...”

“... car? Many political thinkers have found themselves exiled by choice or force, including Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Rousseau, Marx, Lenin, Berlin, Arendt, Shklar and Machiavelli himself. Cicero was decapitated while trying to hot-foot it from Rome; according to Cassius Dio, his tongue was pulled out and jabbed with a hairpin ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... due process. One may recoil at the proposal as a form of institutionalised depravity, or say with Augustine that an unjust law – like the 1935 Nuremberg laws – is no law at all. Of course we want good laws rather than bad ones, just as sponsors of the US anti-miscegenation laws in the early 20th century thought that leaving such matters unlegislated was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... brain’ and about woman representing ‘a form of atavism’. She has paraphrased these bits from Augustine, Burroughs, Cato, Darwin and more than thirty other exemplars of ‘the misogyny that pops like a blackhead if you press the surface of most canonical prose even slightly’. You could call it slapdash, this cutting-and-pasting-in of sages, or you can ...”

“... long time to establish itself. It is sometimes traced back to a remarkable passage in St Augustine’s Soliloquies from about 386 ad:But the fictitious [mendax] I call that which is produced by makers of fiction [mentientibus]: these differ from the misleading [a fallacibus] in this, that every misleader [fallax] has a desire to deceive: while not ...”