Acknowledgements
Anyone who studies Blessed John Henry Newman is indebted to the many excellent scholars who have written on him. For my part, I have gained greatly from the work of Ian Ker, Sheridan Gilley, James Pereiro, Eric Griffiths, Edward Short, Roderick Strange, Nicholas Lash, Frank M. Turner, Charles Stephen Dessain, Arthur Dwight Culler, David DeLaura, John Coulsdon, Stephen Prickett and Wilfrid Ward.
I owe a lot to the advice and support of friends, who have read draft chapters; I would particularly like to thank Simon Dunitz, Josh Ireland, Dr Nicholas Austin S. J. (They are not to blame for whatever is amiss with this book: they did their best with me.)
My thanks to the Birmingham Oratory, for permission to quote from the Letters and Diaries and the Oratory Papers of Newman, and to Oxford University Press, for permission to quote from the paper of S. F. Wood, on the origins and development of the Oxford Movement, first published in Ethos and the Oxford Movement, by James Pereiro.
I am very grateful indeed to Robin Baird-Smith at Bloomsbury, for being willing to commission this book, and for his encouragement, to my editors at Bloomsbury, Anna Turton and Sarah Blake, for their (much exercised) patience, and their professionalism, and to my copyeditor, Divya Darshani Bardhan, for her skilful and attentive editing.
I owe my parents thanks that cannot be measured, for a lifetime of support, kindness and wise advice. This book is dedicated to them.
My wonderful wife, Melissa, has given me unstinting and unfailingly kind support throughout the writing of this book (despite all the bother that it has involved for her). I am extremely grateful to her for that (and for a million other things). This book is dedicated to her, and to our two boys, Alexander and Matthew, for the joy they all give me every day.