Back in the spotlight

Both Bishop Rowan Williams and his wife, Jane, were back in the spotlight this week. Bishop Rowan has just been appointed a lead reviewer of the left-wing weekly the New Statesman. His first review was of a biography of the World War I poet Wilfred Owen by Guy Cuthbertson. Cuthbertson has written a good deal about gay themes in literature and Williams salutes the author for dealing ver y intelligently and unsensationally with the poet’s emotional life (he judges he had no consummated relationships) but he can’t resist having a go at Michael Gove for thinking the antiheroic reading of the Great War began in the 1960s. Actually it was then, the Cambridge historian David Reynolds has argued, that Owen’s poetry really started to be appreciated. Dr Jane Williams is in trouble for refusing to name a favourite woman in the Bible, going definitely for St Paul. She makes this selection in another Bloomsbur y book Women Waiting, due to be launched next week at St James, Piccadilly. Other contributors include Lucy Winkett, Rose Hudson-Wilkin and Vivienne Faull and they were all able to name a woman. It will be interesting to learn of their views of Jane’s choice. The Mail on Sunday has its own strong views. It suggested Jael, who drove a tent peg through the head of the wicked Sisera or Susanna who triumphed over sexual harassment.