The story of Noah’s flood will never go out of fashion
‘They put the behemoths in the hold along with the rhinos, the hippos and the elephants. It was a sensible decision to use them as ballast, but you can imagine the stench.’ So begins Julian Barnes’s quirky novel A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, through which the story of Noah and the flood flows like an underground river. As Philip C. Almond shows in this impressively erudite book, the tale courses through two millennia of western thought with similar power. The story, found early in the book of Genesis, lurks in the half-remembered shadows of our biblically illiterate age. Fed up with human wickedness, God promises to wash
