Romantic Moderns

I note several reviews of this recent book by Alexandra Harris: amongst others, Kathryn Hughes in the Guardian, Simon Heffer in the Spectator and Boyd Tonkin in the Independent.

I've yet to read the book, but her tracing of another strand to the usual 'conservative English/modernist continentals' opposition is of some importance in relation to what some within the churches were attempting at the time. The murals at Berwick,, associated with George Bell, are explicitly mentioned by Daisy Hay.

Harris is on the English staff at the University of Liverpool.

Anglo-Catholicism, theology and the arts, 1918-70

In 2008 I gave a lecture to the Anglo-Catholic History Society on this topic. Having not published it elsewhere in the meantime, it is now available in SAS-Space. It ventures a parallel interpretation of the trajectories of church engagement with music, religious drama and the visual arts; and of the place of the arts in understandings of the relationship between Christianity and British culture. Read it in SAS-Space.

Frank Kermode

Rather belatedly, I note two obituaries of Frank Kermode in the Guardian and Independent. Both pick up on his interest in religious narrative, which issued in the The Literary Guide to the Bible (1987), co-edited with Robert Alter.