Hippo

When I lived in south London, my Algerian barber used to tell me that he came from Souk Ahras, ‘the home town of Augustine’. I found it strange to hear a forbidding doctor of the early church described as a local boy made good, but Catherine Conybeare shows me that I should not have done. Algerians have remembered what the Church has often overlooked: that Augustine’s thinking owes everything to his birth in 354 in what was then Roman North Africa. Although five million of his words survive, they come to us from the hands of medieval copyists who were more interested in setting out his doctrines than in recording