Agony and ecstasy in the garden

I usually throw away dust jackets but Robin Lane Fox chose his for a reason. He originally encountered Augustine of Hippo in the spring of 1966, after lunch and his first taste of brandy, in frescoes by Benozzo Gozzoli at San Gimigniano. The quattrocento painter showed a figure with an academic air, in a gown and cake-tin-shaped hat, sitting beneath a tall, smooth-barked fig tree in the garden of a villa, his head in one hand and the fingers of the other on some lines of script in an open book on his knee. Beside him stands a man gesturing towards him.

This scene is the heart of an intense (if extensive) study by the ancient historian and garden master of New College of a man ‘educated to write like a marvel’. The marvel he has decided to explore is St Augustine’s Confessions, a book ‘like none other before or since’, an autobiography in a way, but, as Lane Fox rightly stresses, one long prayer to God, confessing in two senses: confessing sins and testifying by praise.