I’m just reading the intro to this large and battered tome. And already I love it. Jenkins quotes Thomas Gray: ‘homely joys and destiny obscure…’ Yep, that’s the life for me!
Later on he talks about the Church of England, and indeed The Church of England, as being ‘the true Museum of England’, and describes visiting English churches as feeling ‘the breeze of history’, a perfect phrase, capturing exactly the gentler aspect of the experience of my secular enjoyment of this ostensibly ecclesiastical – but in truth much broader – experience.