Peter Stanford

The dirt on King David: Anointed, by Michael Arditti, reviewed

Michael Arditti has never held back from difficult or unfashionable subjects. His dozen novels, including the prize-winning Easter, as well as Jubilate, The Breath of Night and Of Men and Angels, explore faith in an increasingly secular modern world. Half a century ago he would have brushed shoulders with Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, but

A poet in prose

Literary reputation can be a fickle old business. Those garlanded during their lifetimes are often quickly forgotten once dead. Yet there is a daily procession of visitors to Keats’s grave in the English cemetery in Rome, where the headstone reads, ‘Here Lies One Whose Name Was Writ in Water’, so sure was the poet that

Holy heroes

The Reformation is such a huge, sprawling historical subject that it makes sense, in this the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther producing his 95 Theses, to break it up into bite-size pieces in order to sample its distinctive local flavours. Eamon Duffy, emeritus professor of Christian history at Cambridge, takes England as his territory, and