When I say knowledge I mean hot knowledge insider knowledge not the cold curiosity of the antiquarian

When I say knowledge I mean hot knowledge, insider knowledge, not the cold curiosity of the antiquarian.And when I say religion I mean Christianity. No point beating about the bush here, the religion without which we would not be who we are is not comparative, all fall down religion, but Christianity – Old Testament (selections of), New Testament, Mary, Jesus, crucifixion, resurrection – all that. As made English by the King James Bible, as acculturated by Presbyterians and Puseyists, as re-conceived by Shakespeare, Milton, Blake.Leaving me, as a Jew, where? Precisely where I always was, locked away for half an hour a day in a schoolroom full of other Jewish boys, listening to the Christians singing hymns. Separate but fascinated, feeling foreign, aching to have what they have in their assembly, their rock of ages, and then again happy to have what I have, the unutterable name The one thing I don’t feel is aggrieved I refuse the sentimentalities of multiculturalism. We may see ourselves as bringing gifts, we Jews and Sikhs and Muslims, increments of faith and understanding from which this country can only profit. But we can no more suppose that our systems of belief have an equal place in English culture than we would allow Christianity to have an equal place in ours.As for Grayling’s atheism, I would of course have that taught as well A fourth-form course.

Intermediate Fairy Studies.And Dawkins?Advanced Presumption.
More from Howard Jacobson. Strictly speaking, William Wordsworth was wrong, or a keen exponent of poetic licence, when he wrote:

Strictly speaking, William Wordsworth was wrong, or a keen exponent of poetic licence, when he wrote:
I wander’d lonely as a cloudThat floats on high o’er vales and hills,When all at once I saw a crowd,A host of golden daffodils…In 1804, when he wrote “Daffodils”, the flowers were not golden, not in the sense we understand the word. But his immortal lines have become a self-fulfilling prophecy, says Kate Donald, a former International Daffodil Registrar and one of the world’s experts on antique daffodils.She is working on a project at Cothele House in Cornwall, starting this month, intended to find and map an estimated 400 varieties of daffodilsbelieved to be hidden in hedgerows on the National Trust property. Many are very old and constitute an archive of botanical history.”When Wordsworth wrote his poem, most daffodils weren’t golden – they were a very pale straw yellow, nearly white – and many had a red rim round the cup in the middle,” she says.”The most prolific was called the Lent Lily – Narcissus pseudo narcissus – and it grew wild We have always assumed this was the one Wordsworth saw. These days, growers will tell you they don’t bother with them because they don’t live long in a vase, are papery and floppy and they don’t sell.”But the poem may be responsible for the choices daffodil breeders have made since it was written, because it became so well-known so quickly it affected the way people thought daffodils should look.”What the public wants now, when they walk into a florist’s, is a ‘golden’ daffodil. And it’s entirely possible, in fact more than probable, that we have all got that poem in the back of our mind – and now that’s what we think a daffodil should be. Wordsworth has managed to condition us.”Daffodil breeding didn’t really take off until the mid to late 19th century and when it did the characteristics market gardeners bred for included their ‘golden-ness’.”The Cothele project, for which the National Trust has been given £9,000 by the Gardens Fund, has already planted 140 new daffodil varieties after they were received as part of a floral library calledthe “Rosewarne Collection”.

When the investigative work is complete Cothele is expected to have collated the biggest daffodil collection in the country. Ms Donald hopes to find plenty of the world’s oldest varieties in the hedgerows, including many of the whiter, old-fashioned varieties she prefers to the more fashionable “orange” ones.The extraordinary number of different species is a relic of the Tamar Valley’s now-dead cut-flower industry, which blossomed in the 1880s and died out when the Beeching closures of railway branch lines in the Sixties made transport to Covent Garden flower market in London almost impossible.John Lanyon, the head gardener at Cothele, said: “There are even three red varieties. We believe that somewhere out there we have the Devon Red, the Red Man and the Red Cottage varieties.”The estate was one of the most important parts of the market gardening industry until the Second World War. The Gulf Stream climate meant that the crop was brought on much earlier than elsewhere in the country.”But these days the daffodil is not as popular a cut flower as it once was.