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“... Emily was kinder than ever. But the still flirty girl managed to meet and to marry the adroit Augustine Birrell, later Secretary of State for Ireland and an indefatigable turner-out of occasional light essays –‘Birrelling’, it came to be called. Emily, as usual, loved and welcomed, but Alfred was deeply suspicious. ‘Why do you want to force an ...”

“... declares that God ‘sent his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh’ (Romans 8:3), and when Augustine speaks of the Word assuming ‘the flesh of our sin but without sin’, we do not, we need not, suppose that they had the penis in mind. But Renaissance image-makers? Those among them who were rethinking the God-man’s physique had no choice but to ...”

“... poems and in her criticism and conversation. In spite of her NEB lapses, she knew her Origen and Augustine, her Cranmer and Laud, her Belloc, Chesterton and Ronald Knox. She could drive her friends to fury with casuistical arguments and ‘being impossible’. Olivia Manning, a gifted writer but one who never felt that justice had been properly done to her ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... back of a German – ‘Danny was imagining licking the back of his neck as he fucked him.’ St Augustine writes that sex makes us stupid, and that it make us simple. These are not obviously useful weaknesses for the novelist to cultivate in his characters. In The Spell, sex is too often a transparency, allowing the characters to speak only to their own ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the saintly resonances of such conduct. The first confessions were, after all, written by St Augustine. In this context, there is nothing paradoxical about the coupling of humility and authority. But what kind of self-abasement? The Christian model was traditionally corporeal: martyrdom, fasting, flagellation, reception of stigmata, sucking the festering ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... stewardship, which began early and continue to this day. From Aristotle and the Bible, and on to Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes and others, the point was made that rational human beings, the creatures with immortal souls, were the pinnacle of creation. But if animals were always and everywhere inferior, the dilemma persisted (at least for the interested ...”