Of course I bought them when I saw the reference to my own ‘brilliant’ work in these books. With Types of Christian Theology (Yale University Press 1992) and Theology and Narrative (Oxford University Press 1993), both edited by George Hunsinger and William C. Placher, we now have two substantial posthumous volumes of essays by Hans W. Frei, one of the most influential American theologians in recent years. It is not just the glancing mention of my book that invites attention, although that will turn out to be an instructive entry into critique of Frei’s typology of modem theology. The first thing is to outline the significance of his work.

Born in Breslau in 1922, Hans Frei was baptized as a Lutheran but, since the family was of Jewish ancestry, they had to flee to the United States in 1938. Hans won a scholarship to study textile engineering, in which he graduated, but a lecture by H. Richard Niebuhr, visiting from Yale, completely changed his life. He enrolled as a B.D. student at Yale. On graduation he became minister of a small-town Baptist congregation in New Hampshire. After much internal struggle he decided to become an Episcopalian and to pursue an academic career. He returned to Yale in 1947, married a year later, got ordained in 1952, and received his Ph.D. in 1956 for an enormously long thesis, supervised by Niebuhr and still unpublished, reconstructing ‘Barth’s break with liberalism’. In a way, the rest of his life was spent trying to subvert liberalism in theology by making Barth’s Church Dogmatics accessible. He taught at Yale from 1956 until his unexpected death in 1988.

This article looks at a fundamental area of social and political concern in Britain today, that is to say the Welfare State. It sets out initially to elicit some of the different arguments about this ‘institution’, contrasting what is necessarily now, after several years of one political party holding power, to be seen as ‘the Government’s view’, with alternative opinions. It then seeks to analyse these contrasting views in terms of a dialectic between individual and state responsibility, which can be analysed in theological terms. It argues that this dialectic, which in the past has appeared to be threatened by a denial of individual responsibility, is nowadays threatened by a denial of state responsibility. It does not, therefore, seek to go into detail about the various aspects of the Welfare State, analysing what they have achieved or where their inadequacies lie. Rather it concentrates more generally upon the theoretical basis of the system, from the point of view of both its supporters and its detractors.

It is worthwhile initially to consider the term ‘Welfare State’ itself. It appears according to most polls to be very popular, but what is it? It is noteworthy that people refer most commonly to a welfare ‘state’ rather than ‘system’, as if they were thinking less in terms of a particular set of institutions than in terms of a particular idea of society as a whole, namely that it be organised for the welfare or benefit of its citizens.

Robert Liddell is an unjustly neglected Catholic novelist. Perhaps now that Peter Owen has reprinted three of his novels and promises to reprint them all, his bookes may at last find the audience they deserve. Lovers of Barbara Pym will remember him as Jock in A Very Private Eye; they met at Oxford and remained life-long friends. She greatly admired his novels. So did Ivy Compton-Burnett, Elizabeth Taylor, Francis King, and Walter Allen. But the list of his literary friends and admirers is endless: John Bayley, Fr. D’Arcy, Peter Levi, Iris Murdoch, Olivia Manning, Honor Tracy. All of this suggests that he must be worth reading, and he is.

His best and most characteristic works are Unreal City (1952) and The Rivers of Babylon (1959) which follow Charles Harbord from 1944 to 1953 in his teaching posts in Alexandria and Cairo. They are novels of a real and quiet distinction, in the tradition that comes down from Jane Austen. Witty, often comic, highly literate and allusive, they examine with studied understatement the great themes of exile, sin, and faith.

On the most obvious level, they provide a highly entertaining account of what it was like to teach during and after the war in such foreign places as Alexandria and Cairo. Both novels are narrated in the third person, almost entirely from Charles’s point of view, and through his eyes we get a vivid picture of both great cities without, however, any scene painting.

He who claims to have read all the works of Augustine, says Isidore of Seville, is a liar. Yet of all the works of the Augustinian corpus, few have received as much attention as the Confessions. One is tempted, thus, to paraphrase Isidore and say, He who claims to say something new about the Confessions is a liar. I have no desire to be called a liar, I have not read all the works of Augustine, nor do I claim to have absolutely new insights into Augustine’s great work. I do, however, wish to offer some provisional thoughts on a topic little discussed: Memory and Imagination in Augustine’s Confessions.

Augustine’s theoretical treatment of memory, which has of course received extended treatment, occurs in book X of the Confessions. We cannot engage the vexing debate regarding the relationship between the first nine and final four books of the Confessions here. Suffice it to say that in writing the 13 books of the Confessions Augustine saw them as an integrated whole. It is not surprising, then, that after nine books of confessional remembrance of his life’s events and their meanings Augustine should turn to reflect on the faculty of memory itself.