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“... now no more than an evens bet that there will not be a new Archbishop installed in the chair of St Augustine. Dr Runcie’s own time as the 102nd Archbishop of Canterbury is, in fact, drawing – if not especially peacefully – towards its close. Since, unlike his colleague at Chichester (at 74 the doyen of the episcopal Bench), he was translated too late to ...”

“... lost and unhappy people: the woman who can’t stop biting her husband, the monk who reads St Augustine while listening to a Walkman, the ‘enlightened’ father who locks up his baby. Many of Barthelme’s characters are possessed by a greed which contemporary society cannot assuage. ‘I wanted to film everything,’ says one of them, a ...”

“... Ages, to Lull in the 13th century, to the Irishman John Scotus Erigena in the ninth century, to Augustine, to the Cabala and to the strange group of Hermetic writings which purported to express Egyptian wisdom. She was led no less firmly forward to Shakespeare and the Elizabethan poets, to early ecumenicalists, to Bacon, to the French Academicians, to ...”

“... of anorexia and bulimia in the US; that food has become for many women what sex was for St Augustine, a constant temptation from which they wish to be relieved, but not yet; that the dieting industry and the business of cosmetic surgery are flourishing; that breast implants remain something of a cultural spectacle. Yet for Susan Bordo to write a book ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... ammunition wagon. Starvation confronted Plunket’s comrade Ned Costello, unable to provide for Augustine, his common-law French wife, and their baby. In despair he used the £5 he received from the Patriotic Fund to get mother and baby back to France: ‘“Ne m’oubliez pas,” were her last words as she squeezed my hand.’ Although Uglow pricks the ...”

“... image of babies being burned in Baal’s fiery furnace appeared in Strabo, Cicero, Plutarch, St Augustine, Eusebius and Tertullian. (Salammbô’s pet python was probably inspired by Valerius Maximus’ account, based on Livy, of a battle between a Roman legion and a monstrous snake in the First Punic War, as well as the snake-charming traditions of North ...”

“... while cadaver is an acronym for caro data vermibus (‘flesh given to worms’). Cicero and Augustine both knew perfectly well that such etymologies were ‘a matter of each man’s ingenuity’, not a key to historical linguistics. But the method prevailed because it perfectly expresses the medieval conviction that language is a comprehensive, fully ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... body etherealised, absolved of almost all fleshly qualities as they are understood on this earth. (Augustine even implies that since nothing will be hidden or shameful, celestial bodies will be transparent, and we will even enjoy ‘the sight of each others’ harmoniously arranged livers and intestines in paradise’.) Although some schoolmen were certain ...”

“... 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 ...”