This is how I have heard The Psalms, these poems of praise and lament. The psalmist's cry for help and recognition, a nation's prayer of repentance and their call for justice. They cover the whole range of human emotions from joy to anger, from hope to despair. The Psalms may sit in the middle of the Old Testament but their language and themes permeate the whole of the Bible. They foretell the coming of the Messiah, they call for the forgiveness of sin, they praise God as creator and redeemer and recognise His priorities to care for the poor and hungry, to look after the immigrant and protect...

Two of the most famous mosaics from the ancient world, in the church of San Vitale in Ravenna, depict the sixth-century emperor Justinian and, on the wall facing him, his wife, Theodora (497-548). This majestic portrait gives no inkling of Theodora's very humble beginnings or her improbable rise to fame and power. Raised in a family of circus performers near Constantinople's Hippodrome, she abandoned a successful acting career in her late teens to follow a lover whom she was legally forbidden to marry. When he left her, she was a single mother who built a new life for herself as a secret...