Goethe, whose letters Ive been reading very intensively during the pas — Ida Friederike Görres

"Even read in such broken bits Origen is real food and drink. You can feel it being absorbed, right away, into your very blood. How terse, how compact he is! All this modern stuff is barley-water in comparison."

"Reading lots of Dickens. Barnaby Rudge: the last Catholic pogrom - No Popery, the Gordon Riots in London - 1780, twenty years before Newman was born. He must have known people who had set fire to the houses, or taken in victims and refugees. Lord George Gordon who led the mob (obviously a religious maniac) died as late as 1793. Old Curiosity Shop, Nicholas Nickleby - this too, is part of Newmans background, this gallery of living gargoyles, ghouls and monsters. Might account, perhaps, even for some of Newmans pessimism about the world and human nature, which some attribute merely to his own melancholy disposition? That nineteenth century!!"

"Reading ORahillys life of Father William Doyle. Im surprised this book hasnt left a deeper mark, for it contains - often in parallel terms - the whole teaching of the Little Way which created such a stir in the case of Thérèse. But it seems people prefer to accept such things from a lovely young girl complete with smile, roses and veil. One cant help wondering whether Thérèse would have met with the same enormous response had she been hopelessly ugly - a hunchback with a squint, or old..."

"Legenda Aurea. To think that theres no Catholic edition of this most Catholic book!...Richard Benz sees it as epic and myth of the Middle Ages, exact parallel to the Gothic cathedrals. Sunk into oblivion with the epoch, rediscovered through the history of art, in the countless painters inspired by the Legend. Wonderful, costly and beautiful - but belonging utterly to the past, monument, museum: venerable, interesting , imposing - tout à fait passé."

"Life of Paul of the Cross, founder of the Passionists. Astonishing really that he should be so little known, should have left so little impression..Strangely thrilling that St Paul - end of the eighteenth century! - should have prayed all his life for the conversion of England, pledging his sons to do likewise. Once, during Mass, he had a vision of my sons in England. But only in 1841, almost seventy years after his death, did they actually set foot on English soil - through Fr Dominic Barberi. It was he who received Newman into the Church.."

"Ive just finished reading Shakespeares Sonnets, that is, Ive read and understood them for the first time. One passionate, desolate lament - immeasurable and inconsolable - for the waning, wasting and passing of beauty. At the same time theres something disturbingly un-Christian here - the utterly heathen, desperate keening of the dirges, the grisly dances of death, danses macabres, in which death is nothing but the end, finality - destruction, not transition."