“... doubt the sequel will demonstrate. ‘Confessions’, as the Preface observes, brings to mind St Augustine and Rousseau. There was a time when there were confessions as distinct from memoirs; Rousseau wrote the former, Benjamin Franklin the latter. After Southey gave currency to the word ‘autobiography’ the two tended to merge, though ...”

“... to the homeless in Harare’s Hatcliffe township, the police seized the blankets and burned them. Augustine Chihuri, Mugabe’s police chief, refers to the crowds of homeless, hungry and often sick refugees as ‘a crawling mass of maggots’. Bizarrely, Mugabe talks of making Harare as spick and span as it was under Ian Smith. In 1989, Edgar Tekere, a ...”

“... with the two women wandering from the mountains of North Carolina to the Florida coast at St Augustine. Throughout her life Woolson was a walker and a rower, and her method of exploring new terrain was to take off by herself, as she apparently did, like a pacific version of her great-uncle’s deerslayer, soon after arriving in Florida: I walk miles ...”

“... it no implications of obligation.’ These examples are not unfairly chosen. A chapter on Saint Augustine suggests that freedom by itself may not meet our needs ‘unless choosing is accompanied by a sense of certainty’. It goes on to ask: ‘how can we create a world in which most people will not only be free to choose but will know how to ...”

“... the same sort of danger to moral and intellectual virtue as Arians had posed, in the days of St Augustine, by arguing that although Christ was certainly of a similar substance to the Father, he could hardly be the same substance. Nietzsche said that ‘we simply lack any organ for knowledge, for “truth”: we “know” (or believe or imagine) just as ...”

“... the very online Vance engaged in a spat on X with Rory Stewart about the correct understanding of Augustine’s idea of ordo amoris, the proper ordering of love. According to Vance, another recent convert to Catholicism (Catholic converts have long played an outsize role on the American right), Augustine wanted to give ...”

“... a similar record. What, for instance would his judgment be on either China or Romania? Like St Augustine, Kiernan is too ready to label all but the ideal government as latrocinia, and this weakens his punch in dealing with one that really does come under that heading. I would have liked to see him use his historical expertise, which is great, to show ...”

“... in the capacity of the modern American city ‘to revive the reality of the outside’. It was Augustine, Sennett proposes, who laid the ‘theological foundation’ for the ‘corrosive dualism between inside and outside’ detectable today in American cities, in which public and private realms are separated by ‘neutral space’. ...”

“... one knows where they are, still less how to get there. The characters quote Yeats or Blake or St Augustine, but these glimpses of the moon are relics from college days. They don’t make any difference now, and we are a great deal nearer to the supermarket and the television commercials. The only note strong or poignant enough to cut through this defeated ...”

“... the prohibited degrees of marriage. This left the Torah as a thorny problem for exegetes. St Augustine explained that even if ‘men took their sisters as wives’ out of necessity in a sparsely populated world, this once respectable custom became reprehensible as populations grew. But on desolate islands awaiting settlement, the prospect of incest ...”

“... marginal one, precisely because it contradicted the fundamental Christian doctrine (reiterated by Augustine and other Church Fathers) of the unity of mankind. Indeed, some polygenists – like Voltaire, who opposed New World slavery – were motivated not so much by hostility to the Negro as by religious scepticism. The argument that European racial ...”

“... on Othello the external correlative, or stimulus, is the opinion in moral theology, going back to Augustine, that sexual relations between husband and wife, if pursued enthusiastically and for pleasure only, amount to adultery. Since we are not told much about Othello and Desdemona’s sex-life, the connection may seem gratuitous. Greenblatt linked the two by ...”

“... own diary Like it was, Malcolm Muggeridge makes a comment which is relevant here. He speaks of St Augustine, ‘living at a time rather like ours, barbarians sacking Rome etc, and taking little or no account of these events’. Toynbee does not take much explicit account of barbarians sacking Rome etc either, the sinking of the Cambridge boat and the possible ...”

“... is transported above all else by two paintings that detain few today: a small painting of Saint Augustine in a landscape of ‘unearthly glory’ by Garofalo, and the exceptionally finely executed and expensive Luini, then attributed to Leonardo da Vinci and generally believed to represent Christ with the Doctors (as it is labelled today) which the prince ...”

“... The best thing therefore is love, the disposition, Scheler said, which Plato and Augustine and Pascal had been talking about, the aspiration to Einsfühling, a feeling-at-one-with, not the thin ‘sympathy’, reasoned ‘altruism’, and formal ‘obligation’ of the Enlightenment. This love fixes itself on ideals or models of ...”