High life Gstaad An article in the Herald Tribune announces that the UK's upper crust has made way for CEOs and celebrities. 'It's not so much your family that matters; it's what you've achieved, and how much money you've got.' Well, we...

Should you expect a reward for converting to Christianity? The question embarrasses many modern Christians, but the answer from past missionaries and converts was an emphatic yes. However, should the reward be left solely to the next world - harps and thrones, etc? Or...

Mr. Burgess, who has in "Earthly Powers" made a remarkable recovery from a series of indifferent fictions that began with "MF," chooses to write entirely from the point of view of an octogenarian homosexual…. To be sure, the heterosexuals in "Earthly Powers" fare almost as poorly as the homosexuals, once Mr. Burgess punches the total bar on his adding machine, but the homosexuals range from the opportunistic to the nasty and seem, in the scheme of the novel, ...

Earthly Powers is a novel which engages twentieth-century personalities, events, ideas and problems in a way that makes David Lodge's How Far Can You Go? look like a parish magazine. In the process, it explores the dealings of fiction with the actual: fiction's kaleidoscopic scramblings and refractions of real bits and pieces into a vivid pattern, a pattern made in Earthly Powers out of the combination of an intellectual, witty scheme with the narrative shapings of a more traditional sequentia...

By the time I had reached the end of [Earthly Powers] I had accumulated enough notes to make a modest book: a fact that bears witness to the sheer density of the writing, as well as the seriousness of its concern. It is unwise to skim. Only in retrospect can you identify what could safely have been skipped as supererogatory or duplicate. Since complaints will follow—grave matters incur grave complaint—let me say at the outset that Earthly Powers carries greater intellectual substance, more pow...