Though Sir Anthony Kenny warns the reader that Brief Encounters: Notes from a Philosopher’s Diary is emphatically not an autobiography, the fascination of this collection of elegant, entertaining, revealing, often witty and sometimes deliciously indiscreet vignettes of people he has known

Brief Encounters: Notes from a Philosopher’s Diary
ANTHONY KENNY
(SPCK, 224 PP, £19.99)
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Though Sir Anthony Kenny warns the reader that Brief Encounters: Notes from a Philosopher’s Diary is emphatically not an autobiography, the fascination of this collection of elegant, entertaining, revealing, often witty and sometimes deliciously indiscreet vignettes of people he has known – or, at least, encountered, some only briefly – resides as much in what the impressions he recounts tell you about the author, as the intriguing insights into his subjects.

Readers will be familiar with Kenny’s two volumes of autobiography. A Path from Rome is a candid and sensitive account of his change of life from Catholic priest to agnostic academic, a passage much more momentous and turbulent then than now. A Life in Oxford describes his life from 1964 onwards as an Oxford don and, successively, as master of Balliol and ­warden of Rhodes House, riveting to Oxonians, probably less gripping to non-Oxonians.

Intended to situate each of his 60 characters, Kenny sketches in an introductory chapter a useful and revealing chronological summary of his life so far. He was effectively fatherless from the age of two, which was when his parents’ marriage broke down. His father, a merchant seaman, was killed when his ship was torpedoed in 1940. His mother’s brother, the Scripture scholar Fr Alex Jones, general editor of the Jerusalem Bible, filled his father’s shoes and had the greatest influence on Kenny’s life. Specifically, he was the chief inspiration to his becoming a priest. Significantly, Alexander Jones takes pride of place as the first of his accounts.

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