There is nothing like an imminent canonisation to focus the attention of publishers.

There is nothing like an imminent canonisation to focus the attention of publishers. John Henry Newman has for years been well served by biographers, commentators on various aspects of his thought, and (indispensably) by editors of his voluminous writings. But there is still, it seems, more to be said about him.

Pick of the crop is Eamon Duffy’s John Henry Newman: A Very Brief History (SPCK, £12.99; Tablet price, £11.69). What the reader takes from this dense yet limpid book is respect for the immense, but not uncritically presented, scope of Newman’s witness to the Christian faith as a thing living, yet reasonable: our means of touching something objectively constant, benign, numinous.

Newman was in his time, Duffy reckons, “the best mind in the Catholic Church”, and accordingly he considers him under a series of specifically intellectual headings. He begins with a fine account of Newman’s developing relation with the Church Fathers.

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