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“... Why can​ the dead do such great things? Augustine’s rhetorical question, posed near the end of The City of God, launches Robert Bartlett’s massive, erudite compendium of saint lore. Bartlett never cites the bishop’s answer, which is that feats performed from beyond the grave vindicate faith in the resurrection ...”

“... conflicts within Christianity, for example, opponents consistently accuse each other of Judaising. Martin Luther’s anti-Jewish invectives were closely tied to his critique of the Catholic Church: practices like the trade in indulgences – as if God’s mercy could be bought – showed the Jewish corruption of a church that valued works more than faith. The ...”

“... be infested with moles. The business schools have been covering the ground with Malcolm Bradbury, Martin Wiener and Correlli Barnett. Their audit of the nation is complete. Confirming old suspicions about the degeneracy of the sociology department, it has also brought out a newer truth about English culture and its responsibility for the decline of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... she turned to the work of the poet Nelly Sachs, who chose to rinse her German in the waters of Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig and their version of scripture, rather than depend on Luther’s translation; Sachs wanted to catch their ‘psalmodic breath … creating a new space for responsibility instead of being crushed under the weight of original ...”

“... Empson’s return from China; this fashion, led by such as C.S. Lewis and practised by such as Fr Martin Jarrett-Kerr, seemed interesting to others, who may thus have seemed, willy-nilly, to be crypto-Christians. One point of importance in this, as usual good, but as usual digressive, essay concerns Empson’s refusal to distinguish between the truth 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as much as Les Misérables, which she had read before she was nine. She also read Jack London’s Martin Eden, a book about a self-taught writer which she later suspected had given her inspiration for her future life. A schoolteacher called Mr Starkie, recognising an unusual capacity in the girl, lent her The Sorrows of Young Werther. She started keeping a ...”