John Cornwell
Turbulent Priest
Leaving Alexandria: A Memoir of Faith and Doubt
By Richard Holloway
Canongate 358pp £17.99 order from our bookshop
Richard Holloway is the first mate who incites a mutiny, makes his fellow mutineers walk the plank, dynamites the scuppers, and takes to a lifeboat. His has been a difficult life for his shipmates. Approaching eighty, he today finds himself stranded on Dover Beach, from whence he bleakly views the foundering ship of Faith in which he sailed so proudly – once.
Holloway started life in a small town in the west of Scotland called Alexandria, where he served as an altar boy in his local Episcopal church. Drawn to the priesthood as an adolescent, he was granted a place at Kelham, an Anglican Benedictine school, where he received a kind of
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