Search Results

“... Dante, Goethe and Dostoevsky. As a cleric of the established Church, I am ranking high. St Augustine, Bede, Jeremy Taylor, Parson Woodforde and Kierkegaard get only one mention each (and strictly speaking, the gloomy Dane was a frondeur on the fringes of establishment piety and ought not to count). Bossuet, Bunyan and George Herbert equal me, but ...”

“... Chalcedon (451 CE). Even if we have never heard of them they are valid today. And the words of St Augustine, issuing eloquently from North Africa in the fourth and fifth centuries, would be debated as matters of life and death more than a thousand years later in Calvin’s Geneva and in the American colonies – even in some modern Nonconformist churches. We ...”

“... it is that knowing the stories just makes things worse. Not that we have any choice. Jean-Martin Charcot, Pierre Janet, Josef Breuer, Sigmund Freud, Mary Lamb, Alice James, Anna O., Zelda Fitzgerald, Marilyn Monroe and Sylvia Plath are household names. Not everyone may be able instantly to identify Henriette Cornier (who in 1825 chopped off her ...”

“... it “impossible”.’ From the ancient Greeks to the author of Ecclesiastes, from Buddha and St Augustine to the Renaissance poets, death is not simply an ending but an internal undoing which, like the subversive motions of desire, undermines us from within. If mortality, like prohibition, is what makes our pleasures sweeter, it is also what punctures ...”

“... If SS Jerome or Ambrose or Augustine or any of the grim Fathers had been watching television in spring this year, they wouldn’t have had much trouble seeing Marlene Dietrich for what she was. Those lids, those lips, that pillowy mink, those sidelong glances, those shimmering legs and – above all – that voice, would have rendered her lightly accented modern English as plain as the Latin of the Mass to the patriarchs and their friends and forerunners in the penitential Thebaid ...”

“... mentions Vespucci, whose accounts of his travels had been published by the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller in a volume that included a map christening the newly found continents ‘America’. More added detail to lend his fantasy substance, including the Utopians’ alphabet, a woodcut of their croissant-shaped island resembling maps in ...”

“... ability to discern the hypocrisy of others, whose motives, we believe, are not as pure as our own. Martin Jay, whose book The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics is also based on a set of lectures, sees these passages by Arendt as a powerful indication of why the demand for a politics of truth and transparency is bound to be self-defeating. Jay writes ...”

“... for a doctorate, and in the meantime gave him responsible teaching work. In 1509, by poring over Augustine, Luther ‘discovered the contrast between the Church Father and Aristotle’ – a remarkable discovery for anyone to stand in need of. In 1512 Martin became Doctor Luther, and Staupitz handed over to him the chair ...”

“... provoke. Some did not strive, but allowed their preaching to turn to iconoclasm. On the model of Martin of Tours, several missionaries felled ‘sacred trees’, and an English evangelist in 11th-century Sweden met his death after smashing an image of Thor with a battle-axe. In Bede’s story of Edwin it was, significantly, the pagan priest who profaned his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a lengthy tour of France before returning home. Robb cites the memoirs of a Limousin stonemason, Martin Nadaud, who, after travelling miles on foot shouting out the songs of his pays, reached Paris in a wicker basket slung under the body of a tiny coach, the Orléans coucou. Then there was the huge animal population, domestic and wild, to which Robb devotes ...”

“... of a tour guide, as in the chapter which starts: ‘On the way from Plato to Descartes stands Augustine.’ More important, there is a vagueness about the nature of the ‘inwardness’ whose history is being told. On one possible version, the story is a progressive shift of attention from a dominantly external view of human action to a much greater ...”

“... London. The paper’s first lead review was of More Letters of Edward Fitzgerald, done by Augustine Birrell, a barrister, a Liberal MP, and the author of a volume of essays entitled Obiter Dicta. The first poem was by Harold Begbie. It was an anthem for Empire, and May succinctly describes it as ‘rather an absurd poem’. English studies, as an ...”

“... of God and of human ethical imperatives in the face of God’s presence or absence, who led to St Augustine and to Wittgenstein’s fiercely confessional self-examinations. But in essence, the young patrician ripened very slowly. Sexual ambiguities – Wittgenstein called them ‘sensualities’ – may have been inhibiting. The extreme wealth at Ludwig’s ...”