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“... was positioned at a slight angle to reflect and refract the light.6 He was fond of quoting St Augustine – ‘beauty is the radiance of truth’ – and wanted to celebrate rather than disguise structural form. ‘Only skyscrapers under construction reveal the bold constructive thoughts,’ Mies wrote, ‘and then the impression of the high-reaching ...”

“... levels. Harrison Ford There’s no mention in the film, as there is in the Fish essay, of St Augustine, or the Johns: Milton and Rawls. Or of Isaiah Berlin’s view that ‘true liberty … consists in self-direction’ or of the ‘relation between faith as a guarantor of knowledge and knowledge provided by empirical inspection’. Nor does Harrison ...”

“... family beachcombing, gathering shells and driftwood on the Kent coast, close to the spot where St Augustine landed, bringing Christianity to England. Behind the small figures the chalk cliffs rise in testament to the fossil record, the ‘millions upon millions’ of years of geological time. Overhead Donati’s comet passes. The smallness of humanity in the ...”

“... books’ course. It began with Plato’s Republic and continued with the Bible, before going on to Augustine, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Smith and so on. There was, it seemed to me, little sign of contemporary civilisation. Fully occupied with delivering twice-weekly lectures on Europe from 1870 to 1919 and a weekly graduate class on imperial ...”

“... teacher and student that blurred the limits between them. In On Instructing Beginners in Faith, St Augustine advised a burned-out Carthaginian deacon, Deogratias, to cultivate a feeling of compassion ‘so strong that, when our listeners are touched by us as we speak and we are touched by them as they learn, each of us comes to dwell in the other’.In the ...”

“... which never left the minds of the thousands who had queued for tickets to one of his set-pieces. Augustine Birrell added that ‘a certain nervousness of manner, that suggested at times the possibility of a breakdown, kept his audience in a flutter of nervousness and excitement.’ He might have been talking about Judy Garland.Some of his old friends found ...”

“... an unexpected understanding of Wittgenstein’s perception, in Philosophical Investigations, that Augustine, as characteristic of philosophers, ‘describes the learning of language as if the child came into a strange country and did not understand the language of the country; that is as if it already had a language, only not this one’. This is ...”

“... believe that Nero is still living.’ Three hundred years later, in the time of Jerome and Augustine, stories were still going around that Nero was alive and ready at any time to make a reappearance. At this late date, however, there was much more involved in Nero’s nachleben than the prospect of a comeback concert tour. The tyrant’s return had ...”

“... Adams’s more reticent memoir. The Education, although written in the confessional vein of Augustine and Rousseau, blotted out – Adams was more voyeur than stripper – as much as it revealed about its subject. He described it as a meditation on ‘the direction, tendency or history of the human mind, not as a religion, but as fact’. But it has ...”

“... that seeks it out in order to repress it. This ‘dynamic’ variety attracted, among others, Augustine and Virgil, whose Aeneas weeps and loves. There is an elegant and learned essay on the adunata topos, the catalogue of impossibilities. Nuttall has a special talent for extracting large significances from a single text; his characteristic move is to ...”

“... the breast of another person from our earliest infancy, like the famously angry, greedy infant St Augustine. ‘Who owns the breast?’ is the basic question Yalom wants us to ask. The difficulty for women is largely defined in terms of a cultural desire to own and dominate the breast, which is taken over as a sender of messages, an obtrusively physical ...”

“... the threshold of a theory of his own. There is a chapter on Aristotle and the Stoics, then one on Augustine as co-ordinator of these precursors, inventor of the distinction between natural and intentional signs, and herald of a union between sign-theory and hermeneutics. Here begins the slow process of distinguishing between signification and ...”

“... to be explained? This was the question with which the Fathers and apologists struggled. Following Augustine, the Church settled for a strictly qualified dualism, a theodicy that acknowledged both the reality of evil and the ultimate limitations imposed on it. (‘Diabology’ is not the happiest of neologisms: perhaps, with characteristic false modesty, the ...”

“... a view of the nature of man – even more, of woman – which has not changed since the days of St Augustine. Aldiss suggests that Lewis is trying ‘to answer the Wellsian position in vaguely Wellsian terms’, but this does not ring true. William Golding perhaps did that in Lord of the Flies (cp. Moreau), in The Inheritors (cp. ‘The Grisly Folk’), in ...”

“... down. But if time is of the essence, what is the essence of time? ‘I know what time is,’ St Augustine said, ‘but if someone asks me, I cannot tell him.’ Physicists and philosophers have much the same problem: when pressed for time, they have no easy answer. Nor do historians. But they do have a powerful sense, if not of its nature, at least of its ...”