The title of Paul Murray’s new book invites comparison with Alice Hogge’s history of Elizabethan England’s fifth-column Catholics, God’s Secret Agents.

God’s Spies: Michelangelo, Shakespeare and Other Poets of Vision
PAUL MURRAY OP
(T&T Clark, 192 PP, £75)
Tablet bookshop price £67.50 • Tel 020 7799 4064

The title of Paul Murray’s new book invites comparison with Alice Hogge’s history of Elizabethan England’s fifth-column Catholics, God’s Secret Agents. But Murray – an Irish Dominican priest, poet and writer who teaches in Rome – is concerned with a very different kind of special operative. God’s Spies are “visionary writers” whose ­loyalties transcend nation and politics; their snooping is in the service of what Shakespeare, at the close of King Lear, called “the mystery of things”.

Being a writer, even a visionary writer, might sound like a life less daring than one risking the rack, or the hangman’s noose, and it is true that (unlike Hogge’s “agents”) Murray’s “spies” do not face mortal danger. Still, they are defined above all by their boldness, by their willingness and ability to see and say things differently, even shockingly. The word Murray consistently circles back to is “audacity”.

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