“... obscuring it in a host of details), there are some notable absences, among them the names of St Augustine and St Benedict. Yet the moral of Dunn’s distinguished book is surely that new Dark Ages are at hand, and that we shall have to learn to construct communities which have some hope of surviving them. Dunn’s own doubts are far more measured in their ...”

“... a very wide audience. Or one can see the long shadows cast by the powerful minds of the Fathers: Augustine’s musings on the first half of a cryptic Biblical verse (Isaiah 65: 20) reappear in Aelfric, John Mirk, perhaps Pearl; Gregory’s interpretation of the second half of the verse influences not only Bede and Aelfric but Petrarch and various Middle ...”

“... of boyhood, and putting on the toga virilis, the plain white toga of manhood. In his Confessions Augustine tells the excruciating story of how his father noticed that his little boy was growing up when he saw him naked in the public baths, and rushed off excitedly to tell his mother. Young men traditionally dedicated their first beard to the household ...”

“... And they can be remarkably fair. In Sierra Leone, three former rebel leaders, Issa Sesay, Augustine Gbao and Morris Kallon, stand accused of horrendous crimes before a hybrid court made up of national and international judges. Earlier this year, the tribunal ruled that its president, Geoffrey Robertson QC, could not participate in cases concerning the ...”

“... point of pure consciousness. Nor had it much in common with the human soul as imagined, say, by St Augustine. It was not really a matter of being, either. In the case of Montaigne, grovelling on the earth, we might legitimately ask what else he had left. The answer is a certain sort of sensation: a feeling that has always been present but mostly unacknowledged ...”

“... image of babies being burned in Baal’s fiery furnace appeared in Strabo, Cicero, Plutarch, St Augustine, Eusebius and Tertullian. (Salammbô’s pet python was probably inspired by Valerius Maximus’ account, based on Livy, of a battle between a Roman legion and a monstrous snake in the First Punic War, as well as the snake-charming traditions of North ...”

“... ammunition wagon. Starvation confronted Plunket’s comrade Ned Costello, unable to provide for Augustine, his common-law French wife, and their baby. In despair he used the £5 he received from the Patriotic Fund to get mother and baby back to France: ‘“Ne m’oubliez pas,” were her last words as she squeezed my hand.’ Although Uglow pricks the ...”

“... now no more than an evens bet that there will not be a new Archbishop installed in the chair of St Augustine. Dr Runcie’s own time as the 102nd Archbishop of Canterbury is, in fact, drawing – if not especially peacefully – towards its close. Since, unlike his colleague at Chichester (at 74 the doyen of the episcopal Bench), he was translated too late to ...”

“... of anorexia and bulimia in the US; that food has become for many women what sex was for St Augustine, a constant temptation from which they wish to be relieved, but not yet; that the dieting industry and the business of cosmetic surgery are flourishing; that breast implants remain something of a cultural spectacle. Yet for Susan Bordo to write a book ...”

“... while cadaver is an acronym for caro data vermibus (‘flesh given to worms’). Cicero and Augustine both knew perfectly well that such etymologies were ‘a matter of each man’s ingenuity’, not a key to historical linguistics. But the method prevailed because it perfectly expresses the medieval conviction that language is a comprehensive, fully ...”

“... unravel. In Christian thinking, to arrange or create mathematically was to draw closer to God. St Augustine made this point throughout his career, starting in The Confessions (397) and running to The City of God (c.413-26). He argued that mathematical patterns reveal something of the structure of creation: ‘Wherever you turn, Wisdom speaks to you through ...”

“... Ages, to Lull in the 13th century, to the Irishman John Scotus Erigena in the ninth century, to Augustine, to the Cabala and to the strange group of Hermetic writings which purported to express Egyptian wisdom. She was led no less firmly forward to Shakespeare and the Elizabethan poets, to early ecumenicalists, to Bacon, to the French Academicians, to ...”

“... lost and unhappy people: the woman who can’t stop biting her husband, the monk who reads St Augustine while listening to a Walkman, the ‘enlightened’ father who locks up his baby. Many of Barthelme’s characters are possessed by a greed which contemporary society cannot assuage. ‘I wanted to film everything,’ says one of them, a ...”

“... over-workers – everyone has their confessional niche. Byron famously remarked that ‘Augustine in his fine Confessions makes the reader envy his transgressions’; no such envy is likely to arise from reading Ryan’s accounts of his joyless couplings. He reached his lowest point when he found himself driving hundreds of miles one weekend with ...”

“... Calvino suggests in The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1973), you could hardly tell him from St Augustine. Both saints are often pictured as writers, and ‘a man at a desk resembles every other man at a desk.’ By the same token, all writers resemble themselves even when they change desks, and even at quite different stages of their career. ‘I can write ...”