Whether it's Bob Dylan playing his electric guitar, the Tottenham footballer Sol Campbell signing for Arsenal or Nick Clegg's promises on tuition fees, it's the quickest way of saying: "You bastard." Peter Stanford's useful cultural biography now puts the man behind the name in context.
The book reads as if it were a television documentary. Stanford travels to Jerusalem to seek out the Garden of Gethsemane and the Field of Blood. He looks at pulpits and frescoes in Volterra and Florence; and then at stained glass windows in the churches of Norfolk and Dorset. He examines manuscripts, from the accounts of the evangelists to the The Gospel of Judas (discovered as recently as 2006); and he takes us, chronologically, through the cultural legacy in works such as the Legenda Aurea, complied by Jacobus de Voragine, in which the story of suicidal regret is bizarrely conflated with that of Oedipus.
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