This delightfully eccentric memoir begins with one of the most arresting opening sentences I have read in a long time. ‘It was in my first year at Oxford’, Robert Irwin writes, ‘that I decided that I wanted to become a Muslim saint.’ It’s an uncommon ambition, particularly for someone raised as an Anglican, a former pupil of Epsom College and the son of the superintendent of the Holloway Sanitarium. But Irwin, by his own admission, was always a bit of a strange case.

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