Quentin Letts’s delightful tales bring first-century Jerusalem to quirky life and show how the prophet Simeon, whose Nunc Dimittis became one of the great canticles of Christendom, can help an ailing twenty-first-century Englishman come to terms with his fate.

Nunc! is a gracious yet beautifully navigated meditation on life, love and death.

Pastor Petroc Stone of a central London, evangelical church gives sanctuary to a young man being chased by the police for making an anti-Islamic protest. Politicians rage about the Church of England giving a safe haven to a dangerous criminal and Islamists surround the church building, furious at the boy’s insult.

Meanwhile, the charismatic, white-maned Don of Doubt, Augustus Dymock, and his secular campaign, the Thought Foundation, are pressuring the Church to sell hundreds of its under-used places of worship.

As the stories twist and flow together, Ross finds himself caught up in a world of bribes, violence and political spin and, at high personal cost, he must confront his demons. The Speaker’s Wife mixes Westminster intrigue with searching depictions of an England which has neglected its beliefs. Laugh-aloud satire is mixed with moving passages about the human condition and even a fairytale love story.