Robert Gray

For 24 years Andro Linklater, who died aged 68 on 3 November, reviewed books in these pages. Always an enthusiast, with wide sympathies and of genial disposition, he wanted others to share his pleasures, so that, while he could spot a dud author as well as anyone, he much preferred to dwell on the positive side, in literature as in life. As the youngest of the four children of the novelist Eric Linklater, Andro might seem to have been born to a life of letters. His father, though, never subscribed to the sensitive school of paternity. ‘Reprimand was unstinted,’ remembered Andro’s sister Alison (‘Sally’). ‘My father never lifted a finger to punish us physically, but his tongue was formidable.

No one will be amazed that George Orwell disliked Roman Catholicism; it is odd, though, that he seemed unable to leave the subject alone. Even his left-wing cronies found this obsession tedious. The Marxist journalist Jon Kimche, who shared a flat with him in the mid-1930s, complained that his conversation amounted to little more than a series of diatribes against Rome. In print, Orwell might show some forbearance towards socially concerned Catholics such as Jacques Maritain and Georges Bernanos, or towards an apologist such as Frank Sheed, whom he considered exceptionally fair-minded. Even this tolerance, however, was in notably short supply. Clearly, by all the canons of amateur psychology, the fellow did protest too much.

According to Cardinal Newman, who is to be beatified by Pope Benedict XVI on Sunday 19 September, it is a rule of God’s providence that Christians succeed through failure. It is hardly surprising, then, that Newman’s great contemporary Cardinal Manning has never been a candidate for canonisation. He did not care for failure. That these two titans of Roman Catholicism in Victorian England — Newman, born in 1801, was seven years the senior — were frequently at loggerheads is well known. Indeed, the differences between them appear set in stone: Newman, the subtle, sensitive and (it is now official) saintly religious genius; Manning, the ruthless and wily Machiavellian, bent on crushing his rival beneath the Roman wheel.