I saw immediately what Madeline Basset had meant when she said that he had lost his diffidence. Even across the room one could see that, when it came to self confidence, Mussolini could have taken his correspondence course.

P.G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters

Hilarious.

If Strange and Norrell had not been such perfect examples of their class, both so unquestioning about their duty to uphold the status quo, then it seems to me unlikely that the revival of English magic could have been achieved. The Government and the Army would not have given them anything to do. All the Government’s energies would have been directed to getting rid of them. Only a man as boring as Norrell could have brought magic back.

If anyone were interested I could in fact point to the piece of ground Mr Norrell came up out of. I could give you a grid reference. A corner of a muddy field between the villages of Blackhall Rocks and High Hesleden in County Durham. I used to wander the footpaths round there in the summer and autumn of 1992 thinking up ideas for the book I wanted to write. At that particular moment I was trying to conjure up an English magician who had a library, and then there he was. I saw him very clearly—small, nervous, librarian-like, friendless, book-obsessed.

But of course he wasn’t unalterable. I could have changed him. Just as I could have changed Jonathan Strange into a woman. Except that Strange was a character who had been hanging round my imagination for years; I had wanted to write about him for a long time. Unfortunately that’s not true for Johanna Strange.

I don’t imagine the story first and find the characters to fit it. Rather I rely on the characters to help me puzzle out the story. If the characters are completely changeable and unfixed, then where is my thread to find the story? I place a lot of faith in the idea that characters (or story elements) present themselves to me in a particular form for a reason. Strange and Norrell meant something to me. They were bubbling with possibilities (odd, to think of Mr Norrell as bubbly). There were things I could find out about them. Writing often seems more like a process of unearthing detail, of archaeology rather than making stuff up.

All these discussions make a serious effort to engage with the data of current science. The arguments are often ingenious and, given Plantinga’s premises, the overall view is thorough and consistent.

The interest of this book, especially for secular readers, is its presentation from the inside of the point of view of a philosophically subtle and scientifically informed theist—an outlook with which many of them will not be familiar. Plantinga writes clearly and accessibly, and sometimes acidly—in response to aggressive critics of religion like Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. His comprehensive stand is a valuable contribution to this debate.

I say this as someone who cannot imagine believing what he believes.

It is illuminating to have the starkness of the opposition between Plantinga’s theism and the secular outlook so clearly explained. My instinctively atheistic perspective implies that if I ever found myself flooded with the conviction that what the Nicene Creed says is true, the most likely explanation would be that I was losing my mind, not that I was being granted the gift of faith. From Plantinga’s point of view, by contrast, I suffer from a kind of spiritual blindness from which I am unwilling to be cured. This is a huge epistemological gulf, and it cannot be overcome by the cooperative employment of the cognitive faculties that we share, as is the hope with scientific disagreements.