Quentin Letts

The 'Nunc Dimittis', set to music by composers from Tallis to Rachmaninov, is one of the great canticles of Christianity and is heard daily in Britain's cathedrals. It is based on ten verses in St Luke's Gospel. They relate the tale of Simeon, an old man who was told he would not die before he saw the Messiah. He waited and waited at the Temple in Jerusalem. At last he saw the infant Jesus. At that moment he cried, 'Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace according to thy word for mine eyes have seen thy salvation'. Simeon was at last able to surrender his life. Who was Simeon? Why did he wait? And how did the month-old Jesus escape King Herod's infamous massacre of the infants? The Bible does not say. Quentin Letts's quirky, affectionate Nunc! tries to put that right. It takes the reader to the occupied Jerusalem of Herod the Great, the puppet ruler whose Temple was a wonder of the ancient world. The action centres on Jerusalem's Deuteronomy Square where Simeon's old army friend Reuben runs a tea stall selling heavenly honey cakes and fig bread. We meet Bildad the beekeeper whose hive goes missing; grocer's boy Benjamin, owner of a mule and cart that might act as a getaway vehicle; the drawlingly subversive Zillah, whose political salon lends her influence; and Simeon's long-suffering landlady Noor. Deuteronomy Square's plucky regulars must endure not only the bawling of a power-mad Roman centurion, Lucilius, but also the more snivelly authoritarianism of Kedar, the city's clerk of works.

Jerusalem is ruled by rosemary-scented King Herod. By the bougainvillea in Deuteronomy Square, Reuben''s tea stall keeps customers sweet with lemon koloochehs. Onesimus the greengrocer piles his polished pears and pineapples in ziggurats, blind harpist Tabitha captivates bachelor Pharisees, Roman sentries doze and the widower Simeon, beset by gout and befriended by a dog called Shlomo, watches the passing promenade. By day Simeon dodges bossy superintendent Kedar. By starlit night he contemplates lost loves and the visits of a bad-tempered angel.Quentin Letts''s delightful tales bring first-century Jerusalem to quirky life and show how the prophet Simeon, whose Nunc Dimittis became one of the great canticles of Christendom, can help an ailing twenty-first-century Englishman come to terms with his fate.Nunc! is a gracious yet beautifully navigated meditation on life, love and death.