I first read the Bible in 1972, on a ranch in Wyoming, where I was working with my brother stacking haybales. I read it straight through, Revised Standard Version.

Think of the different ways that Yeats, DH Lawrence, Pound, Eliot received the Bible, as literature.

I had been brought up Episcopalian, a lapsed via media, but the Bible struck me : the most powerful reading experience of my life.

Introduction to History

CHAPTER ONE

History is a battle of the books.