Getting to grips with God

God: An Anatomy

by Francesca Stavrakopoulou

Picador, £25, 608 pages

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‘My God, my God, thou art a direct God,” John Donne wrote, “may I not say a literal God, a God that wouldst be understood literally and according to the plain sense of all that thou sayest? But thou art also (Lord, I intend it to thy glory, and let no profane misinterpreter abuse it to thy diminution), thou art a figurative, a metaphorical God too; a God in whose words there is such a height of figures… as all profane authors seem of the seed of the serpent that creeps, thou art the Dove that flies.”