“He who has seen one cathedral ten times has seen something,” said Sinclair Lewis, “and he who has spent half an hour in each of a hundred cathedrals has seen nothing at all.”One of the virtues of Simon Jenkins’s England’s Cathedrals is the way he encourages us to take a fresh look at the familiar. Most of his readers will have spent half an hour in many of the 43 Anglican and ten Roman Catholic cathedrals he describes. (There are only 42 Anglican cathedrals in England; Jenkins adds Westminster Abbey on the ground that it is effectively “the cathedral…

Source: The Times October 07, 2016 23:15 UTC