Surely Naomi was going to be the heroine of the tale, despite the book being given the name of her daughter-in-law, Ruth. Here was a strong central – and, above all, female – character in Naomi. Here was a social mystery story and a romance and a piece of history all rolled into one. Then the magic moment came when I turned from the Book of Judges – “In those days there was no King in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes”, which was a quick learn This was despite an interesting verse where the children “struggled within” Rebekah, wife of Isaac, and the Lord explained it to her as follows: “Two nations are in thy womb.” I thought that might lead somewhere, although my mother was less enthusiastic. Surely the Bible would provide something similar? It did not seem promising. The titles still resonate with me happily. I had just discovered the works of Georgette Heyer: Devil’s Cub, These Old Shades and so on. I lost interest in this spiritual debate as I went combing the Bible myself for something completely different. Nothing in the rules against it, he argued. The Bible – and challenged my father to allow it every week. Or did it? My naughty younger brother Paddy quickly discovered “Jesus wept” – famously the shortest verse in That left the problem of the actual verse, which had to be changed every week.

We preferred peeping at the end of the grown-ups’ novels for certain incidents, certain unions, shall we say, of a romantic nature. We lived at the time in North Oxford, since my father was a don at the University and my mother, the bossy one, rather gave us to imagine that every North Oxford child learnt the Bible for the sake of their pocket money: although, curiously enough, I never found myself discussing the subject with my girl friends at the Dragon School. Our family – we were then four and became eight – were told that we had to learn a verse of the Bible every Sunday to earn our pocket money. My introduction to the Bible was strictly commercial. Antonia Fraser on how the strong female characters and implicit romance in the Book of Ruth had a profound effect on her own development

Dragon school in oxford