Keith Miller
The Saviour Abroad
When Ernest Renan’s Vie de Jésus appeared in 1863, the idea that its subject could be seen simply as a subject – that he could have his life set out on the page like any old Levantine preacher; that the evangelists and the early Christian chroniclers could be parsed for prejudice and castigated for inconsistency as if they were the hack journalists of their day – was regarded as blasphemous in certain quarters. At very least, it was said, some sort of irreparable breach of decorum had taken place. The book was more or less responsible for inaugurating what one might call the Citizen Smith school of Christology: dozens of paintings and, later, books which emphasised the radical scruffiness of the first Christians, deploying a potent mixture of anthropological exactitude and gritty-realist schmaltz to do so.
We could say The Childhood of Jesus is merely the latest instalment in this tradition. But in fact it belongs to a small subset of it: its title creates expectations that its plot and characters wilfully disregard. Despite being set in an unnamed Latin American port city where presumably you
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'"The Last Colony" is, among other things, part of the campaign to shift the British position through political pressure. As with all good propaganda, Sands’s case is based in truth, if not the whole of it.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/empire-strikes-back
'To her enemies she was the alien temptress who led Charles I away from the "true religion" of Protestantism and towards royal absolutism.'
Lucy Hughes-Hallett reviews @LeandadeLisle's 'colourful', 'persuasive' new biography of Henrietta Maria.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/royalist-generalissima
'Empathy is our moral portal gun, and it jams from underuse.'
Don Paterson on Portal 2, catching Covid on the Eurostar, and rereading Ian Hamilton’s 'Against Oblivion'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/portal-agony