Saint Augustine of Hippo

Saint Augustine of Hippo: An Intellectual Biography by Miles Hollingworth, 254 pages

St Augustine is one of the great figures in the history of letters.  His writings, especially the Confessions (the archetype of the "confessional" autobiography) and The City of God (simultaneously a seminal work of political science and theology), have been studied and debated for fifteen hundred years.

In this book, Hollingworth presents an Augustine whose work lies at the very heart of Western civilization, and whose self-understanding underlies that of Western man.  This is not a conventional biography (the section on Augustine's childhood is primarily concerned with his views on innocence, and the biography virtually ends after his conversion), it is, rather, an exploration of Augustine's ideas and how they were shaped by his life, and how those ideas continue to be reflected in (and relevant to) our culture today.  There is much in Hollingworth's wide-ranging account that I found obscure, but the book was littered with minor epiphanies that I will carry with me for a long time to come.

Neither the first nor, undoubtedly, the last word on St Augustine and his influence, but a very valuable contribution.