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“... thinks he is psychoanalysing himself while busily resisting formal psychoanalysis. It is as if Augustine had written his confessions while palpably not believing in Christ. Near the end of the book, Zeno’s analyst, who has supposedly read the pages we have just read, tells him that he has suffered from the Oedipus complex. Not true, Zeno says: he ...”

“... and he has very little in common with the flock of his piously learned exegetes. If it is all in Augustine or in Thomas Aquinas, then let us read Augustine or Aquinas.’ Dante is sublime because he is arbitrary and personal and productive of anxiety and uncanniness, like Shakespeare, and perhaps a bit like Bloom, too, for ...”

“... to identify Henriette Cornier (who in 1825 chopped off her 19-month-old charge’s head), or Augustine (Charcot’s ‘model patient’, whose much publicised poses taught a generation of mental patients and filmmakers what hysteria should look like), or the Papin sisters (two maids who in 1933 ‘murdered and sexually maimed their mistress and her ...”

“... Symbolism in the work if Vittore Carpaccio, with special reference to the vision of St Augustine”, brought tears to the eyes of Miss Plangbourne, the External Examiner, but only groans from her fellow students, and I dare say more than a little resentment.’ Challenges everywhere abound. An upstanding young feller, in a pair of enormous furry ...”

“... and pictures which should let you have a go at distinguishing pyramidalis, say, from ‘Augustine Henry’.The London Plane proved itself, above all, as a town tree. It is tough; its vigour, smooth leaves (which the rain washes clean) and a bark which is renewed by constant flaking make it immune to the effects of filthy air. Soot is no longer a ...”

“... as they did, employ our own reason to understand those truths which gave them reputation. Or take Augustine, who was not, like Plato, scornful of beliefs that fall short of knowledge. Augustine wrote extensively about the importance of faith and testimony; we should accept the historical narratives of the Bible, for ...”

“... But he cannot be understood without theology, and he presents problems for someone who can say of Augustine of Hippo what Richard Marius says of him, that he was ‘one of the most fanatical, superstitious, and ugly-tempered men in the history of Christianity, a barbarous influence on Western civilisation’. George Tyrrell remarked of those liberal ...”

“... he may fear it is. The parts of the book are unequal, since Lucretia has all the thunder (St Augustine, Cranach, Botticelli, Veronese, Titian, Tie-polo, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Richardson, Pushkin), and Brutus only the lighter cavalry (Mlle de Scudéry, Voltaire, Alfieri, Nathaniel Lee, Gavin Hamilton, J.-L. David). However, Donaldson sharply registers ...”

“... is not that of these essays: it is the one set in a memorable first essay by Henry Chadwick on ‘Augustine on Pagans and Christians’ (is Owen Chadwick the first scholar to enjoy the distinction of having his brother contribute to his festschrift?). The theme that emerges, to be picked up in many later essays, is the rise and fall of the Christian claim to ...”

“... was drawn not to Judaism but to Pauline Christianity, coming to share Heidegger’s interest in Augustine, Kierkegaard and (in her words) ‘the salvation of the individual’s subjectivity’. From the German idealists as well as Heidegger she inherited the conviction that the central (and redeeming) feature of the human condition was freedom, the ...”

“... If SS Jerome or Ambrose or Augustine or any of the grim Fathers had been watching television in spring this year, they wouldn’t have had much trouble seeing Marlene Dietrich for what she was. Those lids, those lips, that pillowy mink, those sidelong glances, those shimmering legs and – above all – that voice, would have rendered her lightly accented modern English as plain as the Latin of the Mass to the patriarchs and their friends and forerunners in the penitential Thebaid ...”

“... instead he is called an ‘inverted saint’ and credited with an acte gratuit of the sort St Augustine committed when he stole some pears he didn’t want, and fed them to pigs. Over so long a period alterations of emphasis were only to be expected, and Kirsch has had to be careful about supplementing Ansen’s notes from material in the later essays. He ...”

“... It was like she was putting on a play that was about to fold. I sat for a while contemplating St Augustine in his sumptuously lit study. I liked that he threw books on the floor. No one came to the small gallery in the hour I stayed there. It was late October. The days were foggy. By lunchtime, a pale sun fought to break through, and, for about an hour ...”

“... setting where the notion of political idealism is close to self-contradictory, since for Augustine politics is a symptom of humans’ fallen condition. Augustine made clear in The City of God that the wise man should sit on the magistrate’s bench even though it will mean torturing the innocent and condemning some ...”

“... ordinary men’s plain questions by ping-ponging back little tag-phrases from Valéry, Gide, St Augustine or whoever came to mind, keeping things moving, now-you-understand-me-now-you-don’t, terrific, interview over. ‘Of course that’s just the acte gratuit in the ethical sphere,’ I heard MM remind a Toronto sports-writer who had asked him to comment ...”