Brown's biography of Augustine of Hippo was widely acclaimed. Reviewing it in the "Journal of Theological Studies", William Frend – with whom Brown had had a courteous but critical difference of opinion on the religious history of Roman Africa – wrote: "This is a superb book, an intensely personal interpretation of its central figure, but one in which the scholar's full range of skills, those of the historian, the philosopher, and human psychologist have been brought to bear, sustained throughout by a profound knowledge of Augustine's writings and those of his contemporaries, as well as of modern critical works. The entire compass of the life and thought of the later Roman Empire in the West is its canvas."