Allelujah!

Murdoch denied that she used her novels to stage her ideas, pretending to ‘an absolute horror of putting theories or “philosophical ideas” as such into my novels’, insisting: ‘I might put in things about philosophy because I happen to know about philosophy. If I knew about sailing ships I would put in sailing ships.’ This is disingenuous.

During his imprisonment Tasso had religious dreams in the glorious technicolour of the Counter-Reformation: he heard the Last Trump summon him to hell, and had visions of the Virgin.

Alice James died, not trembling, but, said Katharine Loring, ‘very happy’ in the knowledge that the Last Trump was at hand.

The question of clocks and dilation in clock times was at the heart of the disagreement between Henri Bergson and Albert Einstein. Bergson eventually came to accept that a clock sent off into space at tremendously high speed would show a discrepancy with a clock stationary on earth: he just didn’t see that it mattered much.

Sentiment had always run strong throughout society against the desecration of the corpse. Popular piety went in awe of the shades of the departed, while traditional Christian orthodoxy decreed that bones should lie in holy ground awaiting the Last Trump.

At the Last Trump, the graves would yield up their dead and all – saints and sinners – would be reunited with their flesh.

Beckett was a writer of the greatest reticence but with everything to reveal. Heartfelt. To the last. Not to the Last Trump (in which he blessedly did not believe), but to the last thump.

We hardly notice the railway until in the early afternoon we are in the cloisters and a train sounds its horn, which, echoing round the Gothic arches, sounds like the Last Trump.