“... 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 ...”

“... autobiographies. In the first, ‘Pelagius’, the fourth-century British heretic and enemy of St Augustine articulates a determination, in spite of all his failures and enemies, to work for a brighter, less superstitious future, concluding: ‘It is for the unborn, to accomplish their will/With amazing, but only human, grace.’ This is one Morgan, the ...”

“... with its introduction of an apocalyptic and redemptive perspective to the existing register. As Augustine remarked, ‘the circles have been shattered by the coming of the Redeemer.’ Dante plays on an altered chronological scale: the pilgrim pursues an ultimately upward trajectory, advancing on God’s path. But a new and nagging irony has been ...”

“... ritual, with nothing passionate about it. Tom is like Adam before the Fall: according to St Augustine, he and Eve did have sex, but only as an instrumental act, like sowing seeds in a field. One way to read Ripley is as an angelic figure, living in a universe which as yet knows nothing of the Law or its transgression (sin), and thus nothing of the guilt ...”

“... the 4th, and of the killing of King Richard II.’ Third, on 18 February, one of the players, Augustine Phillips, in signed testimony given under oath, described the play as ‘the play of the deposing and killing of King Richard II’. Fourth, at Meyrick’s trial on 5 March, the Attorney-General, Sir Edward Coke, asserted that ‘the story of Henry IV ...”

“... historians, new institutions such as the Club Alpin Français, and by children’s books such as Augustine Bruno’s Le Tour de France par deux enfants. For their part, the provincials were supposed to express patriotism by speaking French and keeping their local culture strictly for tourists (a move that fomented the violent local nostalgia among ...”

“... is clear enough: mendacity is an important art in politics; it is not the ‘accursed vice’ that Augustine and Montaigne excoriated; lies (in Arendt’s words) ‘have always been regarded as necessary and justifiable tools not only of the politician’s or the demagogue’s but also of the statesman’s trade’. Beyond that, Jay also toys with the idea ...”

“... for suicide from the 18th century on that first led to the rise in the number of self-murders. St Augustine had declared suicide a sin, the gravest crime against the Creator, and this doctrine had been enforced with utmost ferocity throughout the Middle Ages. Suicides were denied burial; their corpses were tried post-mortem, mutilated, hanged upside down from ...”

“... pattern. Each chapter begins with some combination of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero or Augustine. As we might expect from a medieval historian, she then looks at texts from early Christian martyrs, monks, Abelard and Héloïse, the troubadours, Dante. Next she moves on to David Hume, Goethe, Byron, Casanova, before concluding with a smattering of ...”

“... are endurers, who feel themselves to be continuous over long stretches of time – they include St Augustine and Graham Greene. The difference also works at the level of entire cultures. The question of narrative, in other words, raises the problem of what, if anything, persists over time. David Hume thought for a while that nothing did; others have proposed ...”

“... and Jewish writers to St Thomas Aquinas; another, Biblical, tradition that came to Aquinas from St Augustine; and a third that informed Scottish thought in the 17th and 18th centuries. The studies of these various traditions fill out his general thesis with historical detail. The thesis has also become more ambitious than it was before. It is not only ...”

“... from Christian mythology; his third-year dissertation at the University of Algiers was about St Augustine; in La Peste, although he repudiates the sermons which welcome the plague as divine retribution, he gives them immense relish and force. I can’t help feeling that Camus could have echoed that vexed remark about God: ‘Le salaud! Il n’existe ...”

“... moreover, that was always self-conscious, not just in the usual token cases (Grace Abounding, Augustine’s Confessions) but in the many early examples that problematise the act of turning self into text. On inspection – and here is the driving argument of Smyth’s volume – the modern or postmodern dismantling of autobiographical hubris turns out to ...”

“... The Well-Tempered Clavier being played next door; an experience reminiscent of its archetype in Augustine’s Confessions, in which another voice in another garden urged a young man to pick up a book and read it. Augustine was symbolically choosing Christianity; what was Coetzee choosing? ‘High European ...”