Augustine of Hippo (d. 430) can arguably be called the greatest early Christian thinker in Latin. The impact of his thought through the ages has been and continues to be enormous. This ‘intellectual biography’ by Miles Hollingworth intends, according to the blurb, to demonstrate ‘that there is a direct line from Augustine's own early experiences of life to his later commentaries on humanity’. This is in a way banal, but also difficult to prove coherently, as humans have a tendency to reinvent themselves constantly, something Augustine was keenly aware of. The book claims to be non-fiction, a ‘historical biography’ (pp. xiii, 3f., 196), which is somewhat at odds with the statement that Augustine's God defies all biography (p. 202). Hollingworth takes Augustine's ‘signature’ from his works, most notably his Confessions, but also others, including the less often used Enarrationes of the Psalms, to tell Augustine's ‘story’ (cf. p. 223f.). Hollingworth painfully ignores, particularly in ch. v, the fact that the Confessions have by now been recognised as a highly intricate piece of literary ingenuity where the factual is difficult to extrapolate. Moreover, Hollingworth rightly hints at Augustine's complex attitude towards the limited power of language (p. xviii), but does not draw consequences for his own methodology. Hollingworth's intrinsically contradictory approach borders on the superficial because of his habit of suppressing the original context of his quotations from Augustine. Likewise, Hollingworth often combines such quotations with equally isolated statements by theologians, writers and philosophers predominantly from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This mode of presentation can be called essayistic at best, hovering uncomfortably between offering glimpses of Augustine's life and of the foundational character of his thought. Not helpful is Hollingworth's lack of precise definition of complex terminology (particularly problematic is the use of the term ‘Augustinianism’ at pp. 14, 179, 188, 207, 219, 222, 247), an occasionally idiosyncratic usage of terms (e.g. ‘geological/geo-logic’ at pp. 2, 4), and his tendency to present clichés or unoriginal, sometimes slightly outdated, statements about Augustine in a flowery style. Hollingworth does not make representative use of the secondary literature as he claims (p. xi). Embarrassing mistakes are ‘Manlius’ instead of ‘Marius’ Victorinus (p. xvi), that Maximus of Madauros (correct at p. 56) is wrongly called Maximian (p. 52) of Madaura, the incorrect ensuing translation of Augustine, ep. xvii.2, the claim that Vergil's fourth eclogue foretold the age of Christ (p. 4), which is in fact a Christianising interpretation since Lactantius, as well as numerous misprints and mistakes in the ‘Abbreviations of Augustine's Writings’ (pp. 255–60). Many statements lack precise referencing and have to be taken at face value; occasionally paraphrases of facts or of Augustine's thought are imprecise, incomplete or misleading, especially for a reader not yet familiar with Augustine's thought. The book should be regarded as an attempt to recommend Augustine as worth reading, but not as a reliable historical or scholarly analysis of his thought. The connoisseur of Augustine's thought will find the occasional elegant phrase, and some freely associated, potentially stimulating connections with more recent thought.