Christopher Kelly: Unpleasant Medicine (opens in new tab)

The​ surviving works of St Augustine run to more than five million words. To give some sense of scale, that’s roughly 10 per cent of all the Latin literature extant from before 600 AD, comfortably more than the total published output of Charles Dickens or Anthony Trollope, and four times the magnitude of À la recherche du temps perdu. Between 395 and his death in 430, Augustine was bishop of Hippo, modern Annaba on the coast of Algeria. He lived in one of the most prosperous parts of the (by ...