| Synopsis: |
"[This] is the story of the beginning and the end of St Paul, that most complicated and worrying of all the saints. The narrator is Diomed, a colonial officer stationed at Tarsus, enlightened, intelligent, a great fraterniser with the patrician natives, [who] sends the strange young Jew to persecute the Nazarenes...[Kersh brings] a highly concentrated area of Roman colonial history to very real life - the ornate wine-cup, the crapulous cold fruit-juice at dawn, dust on a sandal...King Jesus is here, all the time...the fly-itch nuisance to the Empire that wakes its prefects up in nightmare...This is a masterly book, full of live people and a live age, live language, too...We may adjudge Mr Kersh, after reading The Implaccable Hunter, to be now at the height of his powers." (Anthony Burgess, Yorkshire Post, 1961). |