“... 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 ...”

“... study of many works that shaped everything from the contemplation of the self – think of Augustine and Petrarch – to the contemplation of nature: in addition to Newton and Halley, think of Copernicus and Vesalius, William Gilbert and Gabriel Harvey, Bacon and Descartes. It’s hard to imagine the surgeons of the world deciding that a certain group ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as doubles, and how many early Christians were themselves seen as mad. In the writings of St Augustine, and up to John Bunyan in Grace Abounding, the central discussion concerns the way in which God sets the terms, and prepares the grounds for, a surrender to him and his authority. Augustine proposed a ...”

“... lay down the law but cannot entirely remain unaware of the threatening strength of their juniors. Augustine of Hippo registers both kinds of modesty when in his teens he is embarrassed at hearing his father’s loud joke about Augustine’s developing masculine attributes. Augustine gives ...”

“... of Remesiana, a fourth-century bishop from what is now Serbia. His far better-known contemporary Augustine of Hippo praised the psalms in more flamboyant terms:How loudly I cried out to you, my God, as I read the psalms of David, songs full of faith, outbursts of devotion with no room in them for the breath of pride! … How loudly I began to cry out to you ...”

“... Give me chastity and continence, prayed the youthful Augustine, but do not give it yet. Perhaps the young Tony Benn, slithering up the greasy poll, made similar entreaties. For this, his fascinating first volume of diaries, is the story of an attractive, vital, boundlessly energetic young man having the egocentric time of his life without a thought for the morrow, except to move onwards and upwards ...”

“... After pondering some early, damaged paintings of the Madonna and Child you meet the great Saint Augustine – a fresco from the Church of the Ognissanti in Florence – with his wonderfully expressive oversized hand below his half-perplexed, half-enraptured face with its boldly painted lights on the knotted brow and the exclamatory strokes of white in his ...”

“... yet never enacted, presumably because it would destroy their talismanic status. Although St Augustine reassured actual rape victims that, if they had not mentally consented, they were still chaste in the eyes of God, the legends tell a different story. Not a single martyr endures the ultimate shame. Conversely, women who have lost their virginity rarely ...”

“... Chalcedon (451 CE). Even if we have never heard of them they are valid today. And the words of St Augustine, issuing eloquently from North Africa in the fourth and fifth centuries, would be debated as matters of life and death more than a thousand years later in Calvin’s Geneva and in the American colonies – even in some modern Nonconformist churches. We ...”

“... Dante, Goethe and Dostoevsky. As a cleric of the established Church, I am ranking high. St Augustine, Bede, Jeremy Taylor, Parson Woodforde and Kierkegaard get only one mention each (and strictly speaking, the gloomy Dane was a frondeur on the fringes of establishment piety and ought not to count). Bossuet, Bunyan and George Herbert equal me, but ...”

“... Adam’s – is something which, according to recent scholarship, we owe to the middle age of St Augustine, who was the first to promote the idea of Original Sin on which the Christian interpretation of the Fall is based, or so Elaine Pagels argues in her study of the ‘politics of paradise’, Adam, Eve and the Serpent. But even St ...”

“... Despite obvious exceptions – memoirs by John Stuart Mill and R.G. Collingwood, confessions by St Augustine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau – autobiography is not a genre that comes naturally to most philosophers. The typical modern philosopher – the Kant of the three critiques, say, or the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus – seeks perfection in the composition of systematic treatises and closely-argued works of logic, not in the harvesting of personal memories, which (if one is honest) are inherently uncertain, often contradictory, and usually tinged with emotion ...”

“... in Kenny’s judgment, been unrivalled among ancient philosophers (interestingly, the theologian Augustine is selected as runner-up). Ancient Philosophy is itself a rather Aristotelian book. After a brisk ‘chronological tour’, it presents and analyses with exemplary clarity the most important ideas and arguments ancient philosophers contributed to the ...”

“... the reader must be prepared to take seriously premodern other-worldliness, to grapple with what St Augustine said about grace at the turn of the fourth and fifth centuries, and how Augustine was reinterpreted in the 16th century, most crucially by Luther, and in 17th-century France by Jansenists, who as hyper-Augustinians ...”