This week I was delighted to notice a review of my book on Michael Ramsey, in the Times Literary Supplement
(October 30th, p.13; online, but not freely so – scanned PDF here). It is by Peter Sedgwick, retired principal of St Michael’s College, Llandaff, the Anglican theological college. It is the second review from a scholar from within the institutions of the Anglican church, rather than from an historian in the universities (see the first, from Graham James, bishop of Norwich).

It was particularly pleasing that Sedgwick thought it a ‘fine book’, and that he stresses the distinctiveness of it from Owen Chadwick’s magisterial 1990 biography of Ramsey. This is in part to do with the edited sources it includes, but also because it concentrates on the central issues facing Ramsey, which the biographical structure of Chadwick’s study tended to obscure; complex and contentious issues through which Ramsey had to chart a course and which I document ‘excellently’. ‘As you read Webster, the debates and challenges become contemporary, and you wonder how the Archbishop’s staff will swerve around the next pothole in the road.’ Sedgwick concludes that the book ‘has brought [its] in some ways unworldly subject alive in a vivid and well-documented way. It is good to hear Ramsey’s voice again. His vision of a Reformed Catholicism lives on, despite everything.’