Andrew Motion has confirmed his image as the ultimate middlebrow, wet liberal. He is passionately keen that students should read the Bible, so that they can progress on to the true faith of Eng-Lit. ‘I am not for a moment suggesting that everybody be made to go to church during their childhood’ he told the Guardian, but he wishes everyone would have a taste of the ritual, the beautiful mystery, like he did. Yuk.
‘If people want to get down on their knees and believe it line by line, good luck to them. I often wish I could, but as it happens I can’t. But it doesn’t destroy my pleasure in reading the Bible or my sense of its importance, at all.’ Double yuk. As it happens I am too brave and honest to accept the old myths, with their illiberal God, he is saying.
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