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“... woman. On the back of the photo there is a message written in Yiddish: ‘This is me with Augustine, 21 February 1943.’ The woman helped his grandfather escape a Nazi round-up; with the photograph in hand – by turns a lucky charm, potent symbol and final, long-held jigsaw piece – he sets out in search of ...”

“... her that … the true combat takes place elsewhere. It’s to hear this voice that she has read St Augustine her whole life, almost in secret’ – ‘almost in secret’ suggesting that she wasn’t quite sure who she wanted to be, or wanted to be seen to be, by herself in particular. Such choices, she would have found by reading Confessions, are utterly ...”

“... The belittling of the human, the superstitious fear and the blackmail, seemed almost pagan to me. Augustine, the great early theologian, the North African bishop heavily influenced by Neoplatonism, is in many ways the patron saint of this pagan Christianity. Majestically, Augustine spent much of his life as a Christian ...”

“... Augustine’s Confessions, though frequently set at the beginning of a line of literary history that leads to Rousseau and Henry Adams, is a narrative of the writer’s life only in a highly intermittent and drastically selective way. Its aim, as has often been noted, is more spiritual exhortation then self-revelation, or, more precisely, it is an exposition of the divine scheme with reference to a particular life-experience ...”

“... the spiritual mentors of some of the great families of Rome (including Melania and Pinianus) and Augustine, bishop of the prosperous port town of Hippo (Annaba in Algeria). On 24 August 410, an army of Visigoths sacked Rome. This was not a smash-and-grab barbarian horde streaming down the Italian peninsula intent on rape and destruction: Alaric’s troops ...”

“... It still exists, the bathhouse Where the young Augustine washed himself, But now it is everywhere And the waters of the spirit All steam, make wraiths out of men In Paris, Constantinople, Mosques and hammam dens Wherever they are. The pummellings, the rubdowns, Towelled bodies stretched on slabs, And tea, in little glasses, Green and sugared, sweetening the hour Of deep, corporeal peace ...”

“... was 31 October 1517. The main actor belonged to a religious Order known as the Hermits of Saint Augustine, Martin Luther by name, though he also tried out a hybrid Greek/Latin polish for his surname by dressing it up as ‘Eleutherius’, ‘the freed man’. This kind of personal rebranding was a humanist affectation then common among university ...”

“... major figures lead into potted accounts of their hopes and fears of heaven: ‘As is well-known, Augustine (354-430) did not start his life as a saint’; ‘Newton wrote extensively on alchemy, theology and sacred chronology, though he published very little in this area’; St Paul was ‘an indefatigable traveller and missionary’. There is wide learning ...”

“... the population with their gene-pool and language. Was there a coherent Church left when Augustine of Canterbury arrived in 597 on his mission from Rome? The historian Rob Meens has made provocative observations on the correspondence between Augustine and his patron, Pope Gregory I, about policy in the newly ...”

“... doctor of the Church gave a more authoritative and exhaustive answer to that question than St Augustine. In his great dispute with Pelagius he argued that the Pelagian doctrine of free will was just such as might be expected to have come from a monk ill-acquainted with the world. Pelagius put forward a liberal, common-sense view of free will. To Pelagius ...”

“... beginning to pass away) because of a revolution in the way writing was perceived. Parkes compares Augustine, for whom ‘letters were invented that we might be able to converse even with the absent,’ and who followed Aristotle in seeing written words as the ‘signs of sounds’, with Isidore of Seville, three centuries later, who, saw letters as having ...”

“... Russia for the first time, I saw a small panel painting in the Hermitage showing The Vision of St Augustine: the saint, in full episcopal fig, is sitting on a riverbank near a child who is scooping up water with a spoon and pouring it into a hole in the sand. According to the story, which is usually set on a beach, the saint is asking the little boy what he ...”

“... programmed, indelibly stamped by his father, took on new urgency. His Autobiography is as much as Augustine’s Confessions a probe into what it could mean to be himself and into what control, if any, he might have over his own life. Mill believed that character was formed by circumstances and knew the extraordinary extent to which his father had put his ...”

“... philosopher of the third century, and the other is the well-known 14th book of The City of God by Augustine. Artemidorus wrote a book about the interpretation of dreams in the third century after the death of Christ, but he was a pagan. Three chapters of this book are devoted to sexual dreams. What is the meaning, or, more precisely, what is the prognostic ...”