“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... writes in the ‘Apology for Raymond Sébond’, ‘to honour him whom we have made.’For Braudy, Augustine is the key figure. Augustine saw Lucretia’s suicide not as proof of her virtue but the opposite. He called her ‘praeclarissa’, ‘the most visible’, her error being to have committed suicide in order to make ...”

“... Gospel of Mary Magdalene get super-large-print quotes, along with Fritz Schumacher, Gandhi and St Augustine), but also his repeated use of phrases like ‘ancient wisdom’, ‘the golden thread’, ‘integrated medicine’ and his insistence that the world has been going to rack and ruin ever since Galileo was so stubborn about the planets and that awful ...”

“... a painter to the tourist trade at Standard Oil founder Henry Flagler’s Ponce de Leon Hotel in St Augustine, churning out O’Keeffe-like giant magnolia blossoms that surface from time to time on Antiques Roadshow. As I wandered through the exhibition, I kept thinking of one of Heade’s strangest paintings, recently rehung at the handsomely renovated ...”

“... a theory. For Dollimore, sexual dissidence is the way gender upsets hierarchies. Going back to Augustine and Milton for the semantic and theological origins of the perverse, he shows how ‘perversion was (and remains) a concept bound up with insurrection,’ whether it applied to Elizabethan vagrants, female cross-dressers, religious apostates, or ...”

“... One of the supporters of the bill was Richard Trevor, the bishop of Durham, who agreed with Augustine’s teaching that the Jews should be allowed to live scattered throughout Christian society as witnesses to the Gospel. The bill was passed and then repealed a few months later, following a heated debate about the corruption of British society by Jewish ...”

“... What do humans do in heaven? Not too much, though not too little, according to St Augustine, who foresees ‘leisure for the praises of God’ with ‘no inactivity of idleness, and yet no toil constrained by want’. But eternity is a fair stretch: over millennia, any activity might begin to pall. The 19th-century Roman dialect poet Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli claims in his sonnet ‘Er paradiso’:                    in paradiso Nun perdi tempo co ggnisun lavoro: Nun ce trovi antro che vviolini, riso E ppandescèlo                     in heaven you don’t waste time with any work: there’s nothing but violins, laughter and heaven’s bread For Belli’s Roman worker, heaven mainly means not having to graft, and there’s the bonus of free food – a cross between communion wafers and panettone, his ‘ppandescèlo’ probably a nod to the ‘pan de li angeli’ in Dante’s Paradiso ...”

“... of his last novel, The Dalkey Archive, which focuses obsessively on the question of whether Saint Augustine was black. The longest and most revealing correspondence is with Niall Montgomery, a close friend from university and later a collaborator on his newspaper column, with whom O’Nolan liked to share in-jokes, but on whom he could turn like a terrier, as ...”

“... social and cultural boundaries. The fact is that sex has never been simply about itself; since St Augustine it has been as much, or more, about the state of the soul as about the conditions of the body. There may be moments, represented by Aristotle’s Masterpiece or The Art of Conjugal Love, when a largely naturalistic view of sexuality has dominated, but ...”

“... revealed its regular rhythm; if the tides ceased, time was out of joint. ‘What is time?’ St Augustine wondered. ‘Provided that no one asks me, I know.’ Gillian Adler and Paul Strohm explore the many answers proposed by writers, artists and visionaries in the Middle Ages. ‘Medieval people’, they write, were ‘more keenly aware of simultaneous ...”

“... than an exploration of what the painting will be. The ruled lines in Carpaccio’s Vision of St Augustine are neatly mechanical, the drawing is very like an architect’s perspective. It makes you impatient for the painting to be built. The studies of drapery – there are many – determine the fall and flutter of cloaks and hems that give compositional ...”

“... offices, shipping companies. There is, for example, a whole complex tale in his search for Augustine Padmore Williams, Conrad’s model for Lord Jim, as Gavin Young delves into the man’s life and finally visits his grave in Singapore’s Bridadar Cemetery: ‘Malays wearing headbands and wielding besoms patrolled the paths, sweeping leaves. The ...”

“... further, in complementary studies of developments since 1800. After a brief backward glance to St Augustine and 17th-century writers of spiritual self-examination like Bunyan and Sir Thomas Browne, Buckley focuses on the Romantic emergence of what he calls the ‘subjective impulse’, with Rousseau and Wordsworth as the founders of autobiography as we know ...”

“... forces, seemingly arbitrary forces, as if they had been called up by a positive evil. Perhaps Augustine was right after all? Before he left the Manicheans. Kelman likes blending in a Latinate construction as much as his predecessors; he finds the correlative for it, as the Irish did, in the remembered shards of an imposed education. But it needs saying ...”