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“... at a pile of executed criminals and, in succumbing, damns his own eyes for their greedy desire. St Augustine famously condemned this pleasure in his account of his friend Alypius, who was converted into an avid fan of the games after a single glimpse of the slaughter: ‘As soon as he saw the blood, he drank in the savagery. He did not turn away, but fixed his ...”

“... when they come across people publicly performing the act of silent reading. When the youthful Augustine found Ambrose reading without moving his lips, he made every effort to excuse his mentor: Perhaps he was afraid that, if he read aloud, some obscure passage in the author he was reading might raise a question in the mind of an attentive listener, and ...”

“... are three sections. The first sets the scene for intellectual renewal and a fresh approach to Augustine. The title of the second part (‘The First School at Tuebingen’ in the original) is ‘The Grapes of Wrath’, savouring of Steinbeck and the Battle Hymn of the Republic. A nice point is lost when Oeconomia moderna drops its ‘modern’ to ...”

“... to hate molecular genetics, taking up instead with psychedelic phenomena and the works of St Augustine. It is, in many ways, an interesting situation; the new political freedom in Central Europe looks likely to bear the imprint of its first contacts with types of thinking – and behaviour – that were previously embargoed: already ...”

“... humans had a frightening responsibility for their successful passage into heaven. His opponent was Augustine of Hippo, a theologian who has assumed towering stature in the Western Christian tradition among both Catholics and Protestants. Despite arguably being less theologically mainstream than Pelagius on these matters of salvation, ...”

“... gripping 2011 study, Sacred Violence: African Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine). In Alexandria, Potter writes, the historian has to delve down even further to ‘another layer … having to do with what is to us the still murky realm of popular culture, where ideas fused to be reshaped by teachers on street corners as well as in ...”

“... the least canonical in the canon, and the most worldly. It was from his letter to the Romans that Augustine derived his concept of original sin, and it was St Paul who insisted that women take second place in church. The person writing to Timothy, however, was not even St Paul, but someone less important and more distant from the events of the life of ...”

“... with familiar material; some were expressing private prayer; some were simply writing a poem. St Augustine said that all things written in the Psalms are mirrors of ourselves and it was inevitable that, when English poets were still largely Christian believers, they would look into the mirror of this foundational anthology of poetry, as Chinese poets looked ...”

“... the city might just have become – the impossible future of that pluperfect past – in time, Augustine’s City of God or Camus’s City of Man’: a final reminder of paradise lost, here remembered not only for itself but as the habitat of two great writers, a not very well-assorted pair who recur from time to time in the role of distinguished ...”

“... is more or less extinct, is more an extended set of obituaries. The first great autobiographer, St Augustine, knew that ‘when I am recollecting and telling my story I am looking at its image in present time,’ and Holroyd often rather delicately reminds the reader that since this observation applies to autobiography generally it might as well be exploited ...”

“... from permitting the tradition that Thomas touched the wounds it actually ‘contradicts’ it. St Augustine may have argued that the verb ‘to see’ could cover the sense of touch; but Most is not impressed. Seeing is all Thomas has done, the text means only what it says and needs no amplification. Actually, the truly important point about the emphasis on ...”

“... business with him or question him as to the meaning of his pronouncements. As the successor of St Augustine, he has to look back on two thousand years and more of history; as the butt of politicians and journalists, he has to justify himself to a world in which the language of Christianity has become merely vestigial. The complexities of the situation are ...”

“... Mrs King.’ Well-worn phrases prop up the stories people tell themselves. Carole’s father, Augustine, is convinced that his move to England from Nigeria will be a success: ‘He would eventually own properties in New York, L.A., Geneva, Cape Town, Ibadan, Lagos and of course, London/he would do it, yes, he would do it/by the grace of God.’ His dreams ...”

“... are mostly unconscious, even when we are awake. ‘No one wants to be asleep all the time,’ St Augustine wrote, ‘and the sane judgment of everyone judges it better to be awake. Yet often a man defers shaking off sleep when his limbs are heavy with slumber.’ For Augustine, all material pleasures, including sleep, were ...”

“... are easy to trace: Milton’s theological interpretation of Satan’s rebellion is indebted to Augustine’s tortuous efforts to distance himself from his earlier, Manichaean belief that the devil was a sinner from the beginning. And the Manichaean doctrine of independent, coeval principles of light and darkness is, in turn, a product of the faith’s ...”