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“... is that for Adam and Eve to make their fatal choice they must have been corrupt already. St Augustine thought so, and the difficulty does not go away; Auden expresses it as a paradox –Since Adam, being free to chooseChose to imagine he was freeTo choose his own necessity ...– but Nuttall denies that one can explain sin as a simple consequence of ...”

“... very well, but these advocates of ‘Management by Walking Around’ (MBWA) are topped by Norman Augustine, a former President of the American Institute of Aeuronautics and Astronautics, who has come up with 52, one for each week of the year. Augustine’s Laws uses its axioms to mock bureaucratic routine, state regulation ...”

“... and this inclined people to suppose that angels were made of a subtle kind of matter, as indeed Augustine had thought. When Milton in Paradise Lost said this about angels he was not considered shocking at all. But the change reflected back on those people who still believed in Middle Spirits (a few philosophers, and most of the countryside); it had now ...”

“... its plan, it could not have given, the kind of picture that Peter Brown has given, in his life of Augustine and other books about early Christianity, of what it was like to be someone at a certain date in Alexandria or in Carthage, wondering what to believe. It is not, in that sense, a work of history, as distinct from the history of philosophy, and it is no ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... regard for scholarship that his very first act on becoming the 100th occupant of the throne of St Augustine should have been to abolish the custom by which diocesan bishops (however academically unqualified) were automatically awarded Lambeth Doctorates of Divinity on being raised to the bench. It was a forgivable, indeed commendable initiative in the new ...”

“... narrating of the self appears to be. It is not a modern phenomenon: Charles Taylor has fingered St Augustine as the first great apologist for personal inwardness. Nor is it, as Brooks sometimes implies, just a way of fashioning a subjective space within which we can be all the more cravenly subjected to power. If inwardness is a prison, it is also a set of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... missionaries to the Anglo-Saxons. They came in a kind of pincer movement, from north and south: St Augustine began his mission in Kent in 603, while Christianity in the north began with the conversion of King Edwin of Northumbria twenty years later. Mercia, however, resisted for another generation, and the combination of Latin, literacy and Christianity was ...”

“... self, or everything but the self? Are absent-mindedness and present-mindedness the same things? As Augustine points out in the Confessions, memory is partly convincing yourself of what you knew all along; and the representation of consciousness, the speaking-aloud of consciousness, is a further redundant self-convincing. We are always forgetting things until ...”

“... admirers, who normally speak of his ‘pragmatism’, switch to a different register. They mention Augustine and Aquinas and say the president has been studying just-war theory. Yet the difference between moral right and political expedience is not overcome by a shift of gears from the most secular of philosophies to the most theologically saturated. By a more ...”

“... Antiquities, a work almost entirely lost to us but hugely influential in its time, which provided Augustine with some good material to bolster his argument that Romans had neglected the gods. The Antiquities was clearly intended to set out in relatively accessible form the recovery of essential knowledge about Rome’s beginnings and past, its topography, its ...”

“... On the Sublime is the most important work of ancient literary criticism between Aristotle and Augustine, served as tutor to the royal teenager. While the western empire, from Britain to the Balkans, remained threatened by invasion and was carved up among a series of competing emperors, Zenobia set about conquering the largest single kingdom the Greek ...”

“... and avoided his Great Books Discussion Group, which met each month ‘to chew over Plato, Augustine, Aquinas and other heavies’. But bibliotherapy seems to have sharpened the interest of other prisoners; San Quentin encouraged an implausible string of wannabe writers. Writing was a consolation; it was better than notching the walls, at least for ...”

“... staying with her parents by getting him drunk and showing him her stomach. ‘It’s like St Augustine always said,’ she tells him: ‘Oh God, don’t make me good, not ever.’ This kind of twinkling naughtiness can occasionally be hard work. (‘Betty Boop in a pas de deux with David Sedaris,’ Dwight Garner called Priestdaddy in the New York ...”