The Marbles Stay

 I was delighted to learn that talks about returning the Elgin Marbles to Greece have collapsed, apparently because the Greek government is insisting the return must be permanent, and the British Museum is (fortunately) prevented by law from giving away its treasures. Of course the marbles should stay where they are, if only because they inspired this great sonnet by Keats – 

On Seeing the Elgin Marbles

My spirit is too weak—mortality

   Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,

   And each imagined pinnacle and steep

Of godlike hardship tells me I must die

Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.

   Yet ’tis a gentle luxury to weep

   That I have not the cloudy winds to keep

Fresh for the opening of the morning’s eye.

Such dim-conceived glories of the brain

   Bring round the heart an undescribable feud;

So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,

   That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude

Wasting of old time—with a billowy main—

   A sun—a shadow of a magnitude.

A Late Surprise, and Young Telemachus

 After a spectacular butterfly summer, there has been very little action since the rains and winds of early autumn put a sudden end to the season. Even now, when we're enjoying a little taste of Indian summer (here, at least), there is little flying, apart from the indomitable whites, speckled woods and red admirals. I was certainly not expecting to see any butterflies as I trudged across the Beacon Park playing fields yesterday afternoon, having just dropped the youngest grandson off at Squirrels (the most junior division of the Scouting movement). Then, from nowhere, came a flash of unmistakable orange-yellow and there, flying a zigzag path at high speed – they're always on their way to somewhere else – was a (male) Clouded Yellow! My second of the year – which is one/two more than most years – and a glorious surprise, especially flying this late. I went on my way with an idiot grin on my face.
  But enough of butterflies. With the film of the Odyssey still being talked about – and, it is reported, a surge in sales of the book (in translation) – here is a poem on an Odyssean theme by Dick Davis. (Telemachus is the son of Odysseus, and the first four books of the Odyssey – the Telemachy – are devoted to his journeys in quest of his father. When Telemachus finally makes it back to Ithaca, he finds that Odysseus has got there before him. Father and son duly set about slaughtering the suitors of Penelope – but this poem, simple and elegant, is set before all that.)

Youth of Telemachus

It is a land he knows. White sunlight
Specifies each shrub and stone –
And as he moves his vacant sight
Restores him to the ways he's grown:

He is enclosed in reveries
No will can break, and where he goes
A child's unfinished fantasies
Dictate the paths that he will choose.

He rises in the dawn: the sun
Illuminates where he will pause
And where proceed: at his return
He sleeps and dreams his father's wars:

Until one evening he delays,
Past sunset, sunk in memory:
He sees the moon rise and he stays:
At night he scans the changing sea. 

When Powell Met Sellers

 One of the regular treats of my boyhood was going to see the latest Peter Sellers film as it came out. My father was a huge fan, and so was I, right from the get-go. I remember seeing a string of wonderful comedies – I'm All Right Jack, Two Way Stretch, The Wrong Arm of the Law, Heavens Above!, Dr Strangelove, the early Pink Panther movies – in big, packed, smoke-wreathed cinemas. Lolita (he was Clare Quilty) and Being There (perhaps his masterpiece) came later. I was fascinated by the staggeringly gifted Sellers, and have remained intrigued by what I knew of his strange, complex personality – and by the fact that, for all his talent, he made so few really good films, and some insufferable ones. For some while I've been meaning to read Roger Lewis's The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, which has a reputation as a masterpiece of is genre. I loved Lewis's biog of Charles Hawtrey, and whatever else of his I've come across – including his bracingly honest 'Books of the Year' – so what was I waiting for? I took the plunge and ordered The Life and Death online. 
   When it arrived, I was startled to discover that it is a 900-plus-page doorstop of a book. For a slow reader like me, such size is daunting. Would it be worth pursuing Sellers through so many pages? So far, the answer seems to be a definite yes. I'm learning a great deal about Sellers: I never knew he was Jewish (weirdly, his various wives and lovers disagree about whether he was circumcised – the kind of detail only Lewis would tease out), and I never knew he was, in a sense, a 'replacement' for a stillborn brother called Peter – the kind of start in life that, if accompanied by doting, smothering mother love (as it was with Sellers), can lead to greatness, or madness, or both. Lewis is digressive, sprightly, effortlessly allusive, a ferociously diligent reseacher, always readable, and often very funny. I think I might make it through all 900-plus pages, but I'll be taking it in digestible chunks. 
   Here is a story Lewis tells in the Introduction. The great director Michael Powell had acquired the film rights to Michael Frayn's The Russian Interpreter, and Sellers had expressed an interest, so Powell and Frayn went to see him at his mock-Tudor Surrey mansion. Powell turned up dressed in Edwardian motoring gear, complete with goggles, driving a Rolls Bentley and poop-pooping like Mr Toad. He drove straight into Sellers's personal garage, and inquired imperiously of what he took to be a ten-year-old girl, 'Is this Sellers'?' The girl was Britt Ekland. Sellers took an instant loathing to Powell, a man as 'very horribly full of himself' as he was, and began to plot his revenge. He became taciturn and withdrawn, barely joining in the discussion, and acting vague and bewildered when the matter of a contract was raised. By this point, 'it was slowly dawning in a corner of [Powell's] mind just what degree of deliberate objectionableness he might be up against'. 
   A little later, they all met up again in a suite at the Dorchester. Sellers had set the stage perfectly. He had installed his own piped music system, which he refused to turn off. He had surrounded himself with a small army of lawyers and agents, while Britt, reclining on a sofa, had an animated conversation with various Swedish relatives throughout. 'Was a food-checker there, too,' wonders Lewis, 'to check Sellers' grub for poison? Nubians waving ostrich plume fans? People practising Elizabethan dance steps to a viola da gamba?' After Powell had gone on a bit about how he envisaged his film, Sellers said, 'How about John Schlesinger to direct? Clive Donner?' A stunned silence fell. 'Powell was startled,' writes Lewis. 'Wasn't the famous director of The Red Shoes and A Matter of Life and Death there before his eyes? "Rather than bringing in a new voice at this stage," said Powell, trying to pretend Sellers was making light, "I propose to direct the film myself." 
  "No, no, Michael, I wouldn't agree to that... I wouldn't approve that. It's not your subject."
  Powell went home and recorded one word, 'Peterloo', in his diary – he had been massacred, in full public view.' 

'But o, photography!...'

 Today is the birthday of Samuel Johnson (born 1709). Over on Anecdotal Evidence, Patrick Kurp marks the occasion with a piece on various translations of one of Johnson's Latin verses, a memory of swimming in the waters of Stowe Pool in Lichfield, a 'meditation on memory, time's bittersweet passing, and lost youth'. The waters of Stowe no longer flow through green fields, and the Pool, an impressive body of water containing some fine fish, many an American crayfish and a terrapin called Terry, has something of the look of a reservoir (which it has been in its time). Lichfield will be celebrating Johnson's birthday – and the 125th anniversary of the opening of the birthplace museum – tomorrow. 
   On this day in 1953, Philip Larkin wrote (or signed off on) 'Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album', which is also, in its way, a meditation on memory and time's bittersweet passing – and the nature of photography. Like so many of Larkin's poems, it ends beautifully. 

At last you yielded up the album, which
Once open, sent me distracted. All your ages
Matt and glossy on the thick black pages!
Too much confectionery, too rich:
I choke on such nutritious images.

My swivel eye hungers from pose to pose —
In pigtails, clutching a reluctant cat;
Or furred yourself, a sweet girl-graduate;
Or lifting a heavy-headed rose
Beneath a trellis, or in a trilby-hat

(Faintly disturbing, that, in several ways) —
From every side you strike at my control,
Not least through these disquieting chaps who loll
At ease about your earlier days:
Not quite your class, I'd say, dear, on the whole.

But o, photography! as no art is,
Faithful and disappointing! that records
Dull days as dull, and hold-it smiles as frauds,
And will not censor blemishes
Like washing-lines, and Hall's-Distemper boards,

But shows a cat as disinclined, and shades
A chin as doubled when it is, what grace
Your candour thus confers upon her face!
How overwhelmingly persuades
That this is a real girl in a real place,

In every sense empirically true!
Or is it just the past? Those flowers, that gate,
These misty parks and motors, lacerate
Simply by being you; you
Contract my heart by looking out of date.

Yes, true; but in the end, surely, we cry
Not only at exclusion, but because
It leaves us free to cry. We know what was
Won't call on us to justify
Our grief, however hard we yowl across

The gap from eye to page. So I am left
To mourn (without a chance of consequence)
You, balanced on a bike against a fence;
To wonder if you'd spot the theft
Of this one of you bathing; to condense,

In short, a past that no one now can share,
No matter whose your future; calm and dry,
It holds you like a heaven, and you lie
Unvariably lovely there,
Smaller and clearer as the years go by.

T-Shirt Day

 Radio 3 this morning was getting very excited about Radio  6 Music's T-Shirt Day (not to be confused with International T-Shirt Day or National T-Shirt Day – heaven knows what thrills await us on those dates). This is the kind of thing that tends to happen on the once sedate Radio 3 (what would Piers Burton-Page say?), and I guess it's the price we pay for keeping the network afloat, with enough listeners to justify its existence. It still plays much high-quality music, and heaven knows, it is preferable in every way to Radio 4, at least as default listening. 
  Here in Lichfield, every day is T-Shirt Day: the T-shirt seems to be the preferred apparel of every generation. Most Ts celebrate bands, with a bias in favour of heavy metal – this is the West Midlands, after all – but some sport mottoes or jokes. Alas, I've yet to see a Samuel Johnson T-shirt... The best I've spotted recently I caught sight of from the window of an optician's yesterday, as I was surveying the passing scene (I had no book with me). It was this (though in a more suitable Communist red) and it made me laugh...

The face of Alfred E. Neuman slapped onto the iconic photo of the popular psychopath Che Guevara, it originated in a famous Mad magazine cover ('Viva la Supidity!'). 

  One day, I was walking along Lichfield's Market Street when I saw, approaching me, a large middle-aged man stripped to the waist, showing off a mighty beer belly topped by hairy man breasts. This kind of thing can happen when the weather gets hot. However, as he passed me, I realised that he was in fact wearing a T-shirt – a T-shirt displaying a hyperrealistic image of what no doubt lay beneath. I was at once relieved and, almost, impressed to discover this. For myself, I never wear T-shirts these days (except as a vest substitute), but in my imbecilic youth I owned, among others, a Karl Marx T-shirt – not, alas, adorned with the feature of Alfred E. Neuman. 

'His irritable, captious love'

 Here are the 'always excellent Dick Davis' and the 'right decent geezer' Samuel Johnson back already. Davis is writing (to fellow poet R.L. Barth) about Johnson's Lives of the Poets – and about Johnson the man...

With Johnson's Lives of the Poets

He wrote these quick biographies
To be instructive and to please;
      In them we find

Among judicious anecdotes
The apt quotation that denotes
      A taste defined

And wrested from this record of
His irritable, captious love
      For failed mankind –

From fear, from his compassion for
Insanity, the abject poor,
      The world's maligned.

He laboured to be just, and where
Justice eluded him his care
      Was to be kind.

Read generously – as once he read
The words of the indifferent dead.
     Enter his mind. 

Nonsense upon Stilts

 'Natural rights is simple nonsense,' declared Jeremy Bentham: 'natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense – nonsense upon stilts.' He was right: rights are not 'natural', they are prescribed, i.e. created, by human societies (those human societies that like the idea). The notion of 'natural rights' is simply a carry-over from 'natural theology'.
  Unfortunately, the general idea of rights has proved highly seductive, at the expense of its proper concomitant, duties. Most rights would be better framed as duties: our duties towards our fellow humans – or, indeed, animals, who are now seen as having 'rights' of their own. But it gets worse: trees now have 'rights' too. Believe it or not, there exists a Universal Declaration of Tree Rights – it seems you don't even need a pulse or a central nervous system to have rights now. Mercifully, the Declaration does not confer 'legal personhood' on trees, which must surely mean that these 'rights' are not legal but 'natural'. They are indeed 'nonsense upon stilts'.
   As such, they have of course proved attractive to certain flaky councillors in such redoubts of New Age thinking as Lewes in Sussex, which has just become the first English town to recognise trees' 'right to flourish and to maintain their natural life cycles, ecological functions and evolutionary processes' across the whole town. I suppose it will do no harm... Anyway, I am irresistibly reminded of this poem, by George Pope Morris: 

WOODMAN, spare that tree!
Touch not a single bough!
In youth it sheltered me,
And I'll protect it now.
'Twas my forefather's hand
That placed it near his cot;
There, woodman, let it stand,
    Thy axe shall harm it not!

That old familiar tree,
Whose glory and renown
Are spread o'er land and sea,
And wouldst thou hew it down?
Woodman, forbear thy stroke!
Cut not its earth-bound ties;
O, spare that aged oak,
    Now towering to the skies!

When but an idle boy
I sought its grateful shade;
In all their gushing joy
Here too my sisters played.
My mother kissed me here;
My father pressed my hand —
Forgive this foolish tear,
    But let that old oak stand!

My heart-strings round thee cling,
Close as thy bark, old friend!
Here shall the wild-bird sing,
And still thy branches bend.
Old tree! the storm still brave!
And, woodman, leave the spot;
While I've a hand to save,
Thy axe shall hurt it not. 

A Wreath of Roses

 Having spent too long reading little but non-fiction (much of it for review), I turned back to fiction recently, reading A Wreath of Roses by Elizabeth Taylor, recommended and lent to me by my cousin. I had read a few Taylors, including what is surely her masterpiece, Angel, and was happy to discover more. 
  Published in 1949 as Taylor's fourth novel, A Wreath of Roses opens promisingly, with a shocking event (no spoilers) at a sleepy provincial railway station, witnessed by Camilla, a woman on the brink of middle age who has led a quiet, even prim life and is on her way to her annual holiday. All is about to change for Camilla when she meets a conventionally handsome, self-assured man who calls himself Richard Elton. He is exactly the kind of man she is not usually attracted to, and it is soon clear that he is a liar and a fraud – and yet, even when she knows this, she cannot help being drawn into an affair that she sees as her last chance of romance before life closes over her. Gradually, she discovers that Richard has far worse things  to hide than a bogus war record...
  At the beginning of the story, Camilla is on her way to stay, as she has done every summer for years, with her best friend Liz, in the cottage of their older friend, Frances, a painter. These summers have always been idyllic, at least in retrospect, but this year everything has changed: Liz is now married to a rather tiresome vicar and her time is taken up with her baby, Harry, while the aging Frances is facing a crisis in her art and her life. At first I found these characters and their situation rather cold and uninvolving – and it has to be said that the baby Harry and Frances's dog, Hotchkiss, are two of the least attractive of their kind in fiction. However, the Camilla-Richard storyline was enough to keep me reading – and I'm glad I did, as everything comes to life at the halfway point with the arrival of Morland Beddoes, the man who has been buying Frances's paintings (and loving her at a distance) for years. This fascinating, deeply sympathetic character brings warmth and heart to the milieu, and is central to driving the action to its dramatic climax. Described as 'Elizabeth Taylor's darkest novel', A Wreath of Roses lives up to the billing, but is crafted with such quiet, elegant expertise that one hardly notices how clever – and how dark – it is. 

  

A Bit of Paternity

 Time for a poem. 
   Here is one by the always excellent Dick Davis, about a situation every parent – and grandparent – will be familiar with: the awful helplessness we feel in the presence of a child inconsolably, unreachably upset or hurt...

A Bit of Paternity

To tell your weeping child,
'This too will pass, believe
Me, I've been here before'

Is to be one who walks
Communing with himself
Along a wintry shore

And thinks his murmured thoughts
Might calm the crashing waves,
The wind's inhuman roar. 


 

'A Right Decent Geezer'

 The day before yesterday I was walking around the Samuel Johnson birthplace museum with my brother and walking friends (their first time, and they were impressed). One of the interactive attractions caught my eye – 'Your Letters to Samuel Johnson'. Visitors were invited to take a sheet of paper headed 'Dear S.J.', write the great man a letter, and pin it on a dedicated board. Of those that were legible or made sense, most were not very interesting – but one stood out: this one...
'Dear S.J.
You seem like a right decent geezer.
Sincerely,
Ted Reynolds'
  One might balk at the noun – and Johnson would not have known it – but this seems to me a pretty sound assessment of Johnson's character. I wasn't tempted to write a letter myself. 

Yesterday we were in Tamworth, where, standing by the obelisk erected in memory of 'The Author of "Little Jim"', I treated my friends to a reading of that classic of Victorian sentimental verse. Their eyes remained resolutely dry. 

And here is a literary souvenir of another walk, a couple of years back – my somewhat unnerving encounter with John Keats on a street bench in Chichester. The bench commemorates Keats's stay in that fair city in 1819, in the course of which he began work on The Eve of St Agnes. 

Whistler

 Yesterday I finally made it to London for a much postponed lunch with an old friend and a visit to the Whistler exhibition at Tate Britain ('the Tate', as it will always be to me). Arriving in London from Lichfield is always a shock: the noise – and the people! Not to mention the traffic fumes. En route to lunch I stepped into Westminster Cathedral, that great unfinished masterpiece, for some peace and quiet among the faithful. Those Eric Gill stations of the cross really are quite wonderful...
  The Whistler exhibition turned out to be on a larger scale than I expected, but not large enough to be exhausting, and the sheer variety of works on show – from tall vertical portraits to small-scale prints, drawings and sketches, from meticulously detailed etchings to bold, semi-abstract sweeps of colour and light – kept the interest from flagging. There was even a reconstruction of the famous Peacock Room, a dramatic make-over of his patron Frederick Leyland's dining room, done in complete defiance of Leyland's wishes. 
  The exhibition begins with the bravura self-portrait above, in which Whistler consciously references Velázquez's Las Meninas, a painting that haunted him, as it has haunted practically every artist ever since it was made. He was clearly 'in conversation' (or in competition) with Velázquez in those portraits he painted in which the subject emerges from a near-black background. The famous, indeed iconic, portrait of Whistler's mother, on loan from the Musée d'Orsay, seemed larger than I was expecting, and fuller of interest. Its title is Arrangement in Grey and Black No 1 – nature, for Whistler, being something woefully deficient that had to be 'arranged' if art was to be made out of it. One of the Whistler quotations that pepper the exhibition is 'To say to the painter that Nature must be taken as she is, is to say to the player than he may sit on the piano.' Well, his 'arrangements' are certainly beautiful to the eye, and many, particularly the Nocturnes, display a quite miraculous delicacy of touch, texture and colour. 
  I particularly enjoyed Whistler's pastel and crayon studies of Venetian subjects, any one of which I would happily have taken away. In the end, I made do with a postcard of this one, The Palace: White and Pink – 

The homeward journey went wrong, as so often, at Milton Keynes, into which station (of evil memory) the train limped, already late, only to be held there for best part of an hour while a gas leak was investigated. A gas leak on a train! This was a new one on me. After two and a half uncomfortable trainbound hours, I disembarked at Lichfield, glad to be back.
  The Whistler exhibition, by the way, is on until 27 September – get there if you can; it will likely be many years before there's another chance to see so much of his best work gathered together in one place. 

Langham

 I was sorry to hear of the death of that gifted comic actor Chris Langham, whose career ended too soon and all too ignominiously. There's an excellent obit in the Telegraph, but it's likely paywalled. 
  Here's something I wrote about Langham a while back... 

3.9.39

 On this day in 1939, Britain declared war on Germany, and we were launched into the Second World War. In London, sirens blared out, but it turned out to be a false alarm. Elsewhere on the home front, things were quieter...

A Feral Ferret, etc.

Well, it's high time I posted something, but I have little of consequence to impart. With the departure of the Canadian branch of the family, and the absence of the Lichfield branch on holiday in Spain, things have fallen strangely quiet, though the latter contingent return today. I spent last weekend over the border in Derbyshire with my cousin, doing very little but enjoying it, and yesterday I took myself off to Tamworth to walk from there to the village of Hopwas and back. This proved largely unrewarding, but on the return leg, walking beside the river Tame (or rather a flood relief channel thereof), I was accompanied some of the way by a small flock of linnets, I heard (according to my birdsong app) the call (not the song) of a willow warbler, I saw a single small copper basking, and, best of all, a feral black sable ferret ran across the path in front of me. Earlier, in Tamworth, I dropped in to St Editha's church, not for the first time. A guide greeted me, and even recognised me: he told me he remembered talking with me about 'the blue flower'. The blue flower? Do you mean the novel, I asked? No, the blue flower you're wearing – at which I realised I was wearing a rather lovely blue enamel forget-me-not pin badge, in support of the Alzheimer's Society, and all became clear. (I can recommend the badge, and it only costs £3, in a good cause). When I arrived back home, I discovered that my blue flower was missing, lost in transit. An exciting life I'm leading, is it not? I hope to be back soon with something of more substance.  
  Meanwhile, here is my latest in the Literary Review (with some minor differences from the printed version) –

Church Crawling: The Secret Lives and Hidden Stories of England’s Churches
By Rachel Morley (Bodley Head 374pp £22)

 In the past few years, there has been quite a spate of books about our English churches: Peter Ross’s Steeple Chasing, Luke Sherlock’s Forgotten Churches and Andrew Ziminski’s Church Going have all made an impact and sold well. And now, along comes Rachel Morley’s Church Crawling, a highly individual and illuminating exploration of our parish churches and the many stories they have to tell us.
 Morley is certainly well qualified to write it, being a building conservator and church ‘rescuer’, who is the director of Friends of Friendless Churches, an organisation that has done great work in repairing and reopening some of the country’s most neglected churches. She cares deeply about our precious legacy of twelve thousand-plus parish churches, almost every one of which contains something of interest, and most of which have a great deal more to offer in terms of beauty, heritage, architecture and history. Morley is alive to all of this, from the tiny detail to the big picture, and her book is not only learned and wide-ranging but eloquent and heartfelt.
 The term ‘church crawling’ was coined by John Betjeman in 1948 to describe his days out visiting churches, poring over them and trying to capture their essence. Surprisingly, Church Crawling begins not with a typical English parish church, but with the Sandham Memorial Chapel in Hampshire, a small ‘Holy Box’ painted by Stanley Spencer with vivid scenes of military life on the Macedonian front in the First World War, scenes that commemorate, as parish churches do, ‘people that the rest of history has forgotten – the onlookers, the people in the sidelines of the stories, the people just living their lives. The people most of us are.’
  Fittingly, Morley’s book is as much about people as about buildings. As she says, our parish churches ‘thrum with the drama of life’. Church Crawling is not a linear history, but it does begin at the beginning, when early English Christianity, ‘its roots in pagan soil’, began the long process of ‘making nowhere into somewhere’ by establishing churches and parishes. Morley neatly tells the story of the Danish and Norman conquests in six churches, including St Olave’s, Chichester, about which ‘it’s unanimously agreed that the Victorians gave it a godawful going over’ (she has a bracing turn of phrase). 

  She goes on to celebrate the extraordinary variety of rock types that lie under England’s soil, from granite to chalk by way of all the limestones and sandstones – all of which have been used to build churches, making them ‘at one with the landscape’ of their particular place. Morley is very good on materials and makers, pointing out that often ‘some of the greatest art and craft this country has to offer is waiting in the local church’ – and, unlike a museum, a church offers free interaction, sensory fulfilment and true connection. 

  She writes about the Christian calendar of feasts, fasts and saints’ days – and that Victorian invention, the Harvest Festival, when ‘House of God becomes House of Gourd’. Beyond the circle of the years, medieval churches told the whole story of the world, from Creation to Apocalypse, with a heavy emphasis on the Last Judgment and its attendant horrors, often painted in gory detail over the west door. In a chapter neatly titled ‘Concertinaed Centuries’, Morley explores how a church can embody a vast tract of time, as in Knowlton, Dorset, where the now ruined church was actually built within a pagan henge. She also identifies ‘wormholes’ in time, details in a church that are short cuts to the past, as with the name of an imprisoned Civil War Leveller carved into the lead font of Burford church in Oxfordshire, or the sixteenth-century village armoury that survives in a room over the church porch at Mendelsham in Suffolk. Churches are, as she says, ‘places soaked with human experience’.
  One of the most vivid chapters describes the terrible devastation wrought by the iconoclastic vandalism of the Reformation and the Civil War, which ‘sought the entire erasure of social and cultural memory’, down to the last trace of the old religion, so rich in imagery, colour and spectacle. Here Morley tells the heartening story of one man who would have none of it – Robert Shirley of Staunton Harold in Leicestershire, who built a new Gothic church at the height of the destructive madness, and adorned its west tower with a defiant motto. Other remarkable people whose stories she tells include England’s first woman parish clerk (in 1818) and the ‘Icarus of the North’, Robert Cadman, who died attempting a daredevil flight from the top of the spire of St Mary’s, Shrewsbury.
  Writing of church monuments, Morley draws the salutary lesson that ‘we, the living, are just the ligature between our dead and our descendants, the soft tissue between the past and the future’ – which is indeed the lesson to be drawn from everything in our ancient parish churches. She ends this wonderful, wonder-filled book with a passage that expresses how churches are so much more than the sum of their parts, offering to the receptive ‘something beyond words … Something that comes from a building that has witnessed all human emotion, that condenses the essence of human society and human life, and receives you, a fleeting moment in its long existence. And offers a rare glimpse of the soul of England – and ourselves.’