Diarmaid Macculloch
Confessions & Retractions
Saint Augustine of Hippo: An Intellectual Biography
By Miles Hollingworth
Bloomsbury 312pp £20 order from our bookshop
As you read this, someone, somewhere on the planet, is writing a book about Augustine of Hippo. On the internationally recognised standard of hugeness, it is unchallengeable (because fortunately unfalsifiable) that if you collected all who had written about him and told them to bunch up close, they would fill the Isle of Wight, and their books and articles laid flat would occupy an area the size of Wales. There’s some justification for this endless industry, because Augustine is fascinating. In the fifth century CE he produced the first surviving extended psychological autobiography (maybe he even invented the genre), and he is the single most influential theologian in the Western Latin Church – which means that Catholics and Protestants are equally in his intellectual debt, for better or worse. His written output was prodigious, and a most exciting surprise is that some of it has only been rediscovered in the last couple of decades, in remote European libraries. Amid the literary cacophony are some exceptionally good biographies in English. From 1963 comes classic theological analysis from Gerald Bonner; in 1967 there appeared the first version of a colossus among biographies by Peter Brown, exhibiting all Brown’s usual mellifluous sensitivity and awareness of cultural context. OUP recently and serendipitously
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'It is the ... sketches of the local and the overlooked that lend this book its density and drive, and emphasise Britain’s mostly low-key riches – if only you can be bothered to buy an anorak and seek.'
Jonathan Meades on the beauty of brutalism.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/castles-of-concrete
'Cruickshank’s history reveals an extraordinary eclecticism of architectural styles and buildings, from Dutch Revivalism to Arts and Crafts experimentation, from Georgian terraces to Victorian mansion blocks.'
William Boyd on the architecture of Chelsea.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/where-george-eliot-meets-mick-jagger
'The eight years he has spent in solitary confinement have had a devastating impact on his mental health ... human rights organisations believe his detention is punishment for his critical views.'
@lucyjpop on the Egyptian activist and poet Ahmed Douma.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/ahmed-douma