BOOK REVIEWS
THE CEREMONIES OF THE ROMAN RITE DESCRIBED, Adrian Fortescue - J. B. O’Connell, Twelfth Revised Edition, 1962, ed. Scott M.P. Reid, The Saint Austin Press, Curdridge, 1996, 423pp, hbk, ISBN 1-9011-57-00-8
THE VENERATION AND ADMINISTRATION OF THE EUCHARIST, The Proceedings of the Second International Colloquium on the Roman Catholic Liturgy organized by the Centre International d’Etudes Liturgiques, translated and edited by members of CIEL UK, The Saint Austin Press, Southampton, 1997, 255pp, pbk, ISBN 1-901157-15-6, £12.95
LOOKING AT THE LITURGY - A Critical View of its Contemporary Form, Aidan Nichols O.P., Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1996, 129pp, pbk, ISBN 089870-592-4
THERE IS undoubtedly a well-financed resurgence of traditional Roman Catholic liturgy at the present time, in the States and in Europe, and it has powerful backers. My copy of Klaus Gamber’s Reform of the Roman Liturgy, a book which argues passionately and convincingly on historical grounds against the custom of celebrating mass versus populum (facing west), has, in its French edition, what appears to be a sympathetic foreword contributed by Cardinal Ratzinger. (It is actually part of a post mortem appreciation of Gamber by Ratzinger but Ratzinger goes a considerable way towards endorsing Gamber’s agenda). Gamber’s book is relatively hard to get hold of in English (English translation, Una Voce, California, 1993), which is a pity because it demolishes the argument that westward facing celebration, now virtually universal, is based on ancient precedent. It has to be admitted, in other words, that the practice of priests facing the people for mass, admirable though it is in the right conditions (in my view), is a development and not a return to ancient precedents. Moreover Aidan Nichols, in Looking at the Liturgy, insists that versus populum, contrary to popular view, is a convention and not a requirement.
Roman Catholic interest in liturgical restoration is of more than passing interest to Anglo-Catholics. As Thomas Day has memorably discussed in Why Catholics can’t sing, the Novus Ordo for many Roman Catholics has meant little more than a said mass, with or without the singing of “Colours of day” and similar ditties. (Auberon Waugh always singles out “Kum ba yah” as a particularly idiotic song to sing at a mass in the vernacular).
Cardinal Heenan’s remarks, quoted in Archimandrite Keleher’s review of A Bitter Trial (see below), indicate that regarding said mass as the norm for liturgical celebration is not a new prejudice. One suspects that it is the sheer complexity -musical and ceremonial - of the missa solemnis, old or new style which has led to this prejudice, but a particular regret is that even a modern version of the missa cantata sung to Kyrie “de Angelis” and other Renaissance plainsongs (the one-horse equivalent of the missa solemnis), has proved too much for the parish clergy. When I was conducting an orchestral mass in the context of the liturgy some years ago I asked the young priest who was to celebrate about the introduction to the Sanctus. Incredibly it was not until I explained that the Sanctus was the ‘Holy, holy, holy’ that he knew which bit I meant.
Anglo-Catholics have understood better how to celebrate the new rite solemnly but for every re-ordered and well-ordered solemn celebration in a re-ordered and well-ordered sanctuary there are ten masses crammed into an improvised sanctuary with no room to move and nothing more going on musically than Dom Gregory Murray and other no less Edwardian-sounding items from a purple or a green hymnbook. Solemn celebration, whether nostalgic or progressive, is in short supply.
A new edition of The Ceremonies of the Roman Rite Described is not necessarily the best way to tackle the short supply of solemn celebration. The latest edition has a foreword by Scott M.P.Reid (p15) which makes it clear that the reprint is to support continued use of the 1962 version of the Tridentine Mass, recently republished in the United States. Included also is an appendix on “The Ceremonies of the Ritual in the U.S.A.” by Frederick R McManus, from the Catholic University of America.
If I am alarmed at the prospect of having to mug up on Fortescue (having been ordained priest only 13 years I have never had to ‘do things properly’, except at the kind of amateurish bash when everybody else gets it wrong too), I am pleased to acquire the book. It is a valuable work of reference and, of course, modern ceremonial, by omission or modification, sometimes assumes familiarity with older practices.
The Veneration and Administration of the Eucharist, the proceedings of the second colloquium of the Centre International d’Etudes Liturgiques, is also available in English (unlike the first colloquium) and addresses a number of concerns that traditionally-inclined Roman Catholics have. The Centre has sent a free copy to all French-speaking bishops and built bridges with cardinals, bishops, professors and religious. Supporters of this English edition include the Oratorians in Brompton and Oxford, and Fr Aidan Nichols OP has assisted with the translation.
Fr Christian-Philippe Chanut, who lectures at the Fraternity of St Peter, provides a useful account of the growth of devotion to the Holy Eucharist in “Concerning Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament”. The mediaeval practice of elevating the host, and later the chalice, and the development of the feast Corpus Christi, are well described, as is the increasing enthusiasm for Benediction in eighteenth century France. Those who wonder whether the present Roman Catholic fashion for permanent, round-the-clock, Exposition in converted boiler rooms is rooted in tradition will see that its spirituality, though individualized, is essentially continuous with the different practices of earlier centuries - non-stop low masses in the middle ages, daily Benediction in pre-revolutionary France. You may prefer to attend Benediction in Westminster Cathedral to making a ‘little visit’ to the host exposed next door in the bowels of St Paul’s Bookshop but your reasons are likely to be aesthetic.
Fr Cassian Folsom OSB from the USA provides us with a comparison of “Gestures Accompanying the Words of Consecration in the History of the Ordo Missae”. We discover the influence of the Ordo Missae Ioannis Burckardi (c1500) on the Ritus servandus in celebratione Missae (1570) and the changes in 1965 and 1970, when all the words of Jesus in the Eucharistic Prayer are put into Upper Case. The latter changes, together with the adjustment of rubrics in the Novus Ordo Missae are interpreted by Fr Folsom as corresponding to ‘important shifts in contemporary understandings in the fields of anthropology and theology’ and amounting to a rejection of transubstantiation. That view, if I may say so, is over-stated. It is the sort of shibboleth found in the critical study of the Novus Ordo by Cardinal Ottaviani and other Roman theologians (published in England by the Latin Mass Society in 1970).
Folsom’s article exhibits a hostility to the 1970 Mass where other articles target not so much the new Ordo itself as the way it is celebrated. Fr Martin Lugmayr from Germany and Fr Wladimir-Marie de Saint Jean OM from France find fault with the distribution of Holy Communion. Fr Bertrand de Margerie SJ, also from France, wants the Church once again to encourage her children to receive communion daily. Professor Jan Boogarts, a musicologist, complains about the neglect of Gregorian chant.
“Eucharistic devotion in the teaching of John Paul II” is discussed by Bishop Georges Lagrange (France) and Fr Francois Clement (Switzerland) examines eucharistic heresies and the Church’s response to them. Michael Davies (England), president of Una Voce writes about the 16th century Anglican Reformation and demonstrates what few would now deny, that the reformers rejected the eucharistic theology of Catholic England. What he might have gone on to say is that the Zwinglian eucharistic spirituality of Anglican Parish Communion congregations (for whom, whether the service is plain or fancy, the bread and wine are little more than helpful reminders of what happened a long, long time ago) is spreading amongst Roman Catholics. The cause in both cases is the same: the celebration of the sacrament outside an aesthetic of transcendence.
The Veneration and Administration of the Eucharist is a handsome addition to the library and an encouraging indication that those who look for restoration are as concerned about theology as they are about praxis. Aidan Nichols, in Looking at the Liturgy, echoes some of these concerns. In an envoi he warns against ‘the inevitable limitations of both reform and “restoration”’ and quotes von Balthasar as saying that the topic of liturgy ‘can be touched only with fear and trembling’. Nichols’ short book is not easy reading. He addresses historical, sociological-anthropological and cultural-artistic concerns, referring us to a number of German liturgiologists.
His first concern is ‘to prevent the further erosion of the liturgical patrimony of Western Catholicism’. He attacks Dom Adrien Nocent’s suggestions (in Re-reading the Revised Liturgy, Liturgical Press, Collegeville, 1994) of reducing the introductory rites of the Mass to a simple greeting (to make room for a ten-minute homily), transferring the Peace to the Ambrosian (cf Alternative Service Book Rite A) position, abolishing the lavabo, removing the Sanctus from the Hippolytan Eucharistic Prayer and the elevations at the words of institution, writing original vernacular collects and removing the epiclesis from before the words of institution.
Nichols’ second concern is to develop ‘the prayerful, dignified, correct, and, where appropriate solemn celebration of the Novus Ordo’. Improving fabrics and metals, buying up second hand copies of the RSV Lectionary to replace the ‘liturgically inept’ Jerusalem Bible Lectionary (until publishers can be persuaded to re-print the RSV Lectionary), using some Latin for the Ordinary, robing extraordinary ministers, recovering the versus apsidem (eastward) position would all be great improvements.
Would not a wholesale return to the 1962 version of the Tridentine Rite be preferable? Aidan Nichols thinks so, but he is happy for the Novus Ordo, despite its oriental features (which, he believes, create confusion in a Western rite), to be designated as a ritus communis, to complement the Tridentine Rite for three purposes: as a basis for developing indigenous liturgy in places where the culture is very non-Western, as a rite for ‘Catholic-minded separated Western Christians’ (readers of New Directions, for instance) wishing to enter Catholic unity in some corporate way, as a rite for Catholic parishes and religious communities ‘that do not wish to recover the historical and spiritual patrimony of the Latin rite in a fuller form’.
The practical conclusions in Nichols’ fourth chapter are, in the end, less important than the preliminary arguments. Ratzinger, speaking of postconciliar liturgy in the encomium on Gamber already mentioned, says that ‘we replaced’ Jungmann’s ‘liturgy which is the fruit of development’, ‘with a fabrication, a banal on-the-spot project’. The contrast is between the old ‘organic, living process of growth and development over centuries’ and ‘a manufacturing process’. Nichols is less scathing than that but he gives historical perspective to his conclusions, discusses the importance of ritual and, in “The idiom of worship” attacks the aesthetic poverty of modern liturgy.
Nichols’ attack is not dissimilar from that of Catherine Pickstock in “A Short Essay on the Reform of the Liturgy” (New Blackfriars, February 1997). She also attacks the smoothing out in the Novus Ordo and the attempt to bring consistency into the text of the liturgy.
In contrast to many other modes of discourse in the Middle Ages, the Roman Rite deploys a polyphonic texture of voices and poetic positions, through a constant play of modulations from narrative, to dialogue, antiphon, apostrophe, doxology, oration, invocation, citation, supplementation, repetition, and entreaty or petition (p61).
She questions the assumption ‘that the “simple primitive meal” of antiquity had been overburdened, and ultimately lost, by the Roman Rite’ and she asserts that the reform of the liturgy did not live up to the theology of the time, the theology of De Lubac, von Balthasar, Congar and Gilson. Her conclusion is that genuinely reformed liturgy would have to either ‘overthrow our anti-ritual modernity, or that being impossible, devise a liturgy that refused’ (her emphasis) ‘to be enculturated in our modern habits of thought and speech’. Incidentally, Pickstock is as critical of some modern Anglican revision. In “The Confession” (in Theology, January/February 1997) she points out the loss of transcendence and deterioration of meaning in modern expressions of penitence.
Like many others I had become very committed to the Novus Ordo, available in a ‘types and shadows’ fashion in the Church of England Rite A Eucharist, and, though I had been aware of its cultural impoverishment as it has often been celebrated, I had thought the missa normativa to be a very satisfactory rite, much better than the Tridentine Rite for Low Mass at least. My questions had usually been about the quality of the vernacular translation and the appropriateness of the register of language it adopts. (The draft Sacramentary shows an enormous improvement in these respects, incidentally). I find myself reappraising my earlier enthusiasm and wondering if both the Novus Ordo and my enthusiasm for it were not part of the 1960s cultural dismantling which now feels so dated.
It has to be admitted that the 1970 missal’s regulations about liturgical hierarchy have not always worked out well. A solemn concelebrated mass on a great occasion can be magnificent - as magnificent as ever an old high mass with three sacred ministers was - yet the ‘bring an alb and stole’ type of concelebration can be little more than an untidy exercise in clerical clubbing. The deacon in the liturgy is, for many congregations, still quite rare and still rarer are the formal ministries of lector and acolyte. If the regulation which disallows priests from acting as liturgical deacons were rescinded (it is quite often ignored by traditional minded Roman Catholics) and the role of the lector and acolyte were assumed by someone not in Holy Orders but wearing a tunicle, the High Mass would once again be available to almost any parish with two ordained ministers. The no less beautiful format of priest and two deacons (each deacon in a dalmatic) would be available where a number of clergy serves and the concelebrated mass would be a third version of the missa solemnis, reserved for pontifical and abbatial occasions. These changes would be substantially possible in the context of the Novus Ordo.
All that would remain to be tackled would be the nastinesses of booming mikes, coloured albs (semantically ludicrous), tuneless folk groups, flowers on the altar in Lent, poor preaching, dreary reading, inept intercessions, unprepared communions and ugly sanctuaries. Once all that was remedied, I suppose we should all float off to heaven where, anyway, sacraments cease.
Fr Andrew Burnham is Vice-Principal of St Stephen’s House and a member of the Church of England Liturgical Commission.
A BITTER TRIAL, Evelyn Waugh and John Carmel Cardinal Heenan on the Liturgical Changes, ed. Scott M P Reid, The Saint Austin Press, Curdridge, 1996, pp 71, pbk, ISBN 1-9011-57-05-9, £3.95
EVELYN WAUGH was a liturgical immobilist. The book opens with an article he published in The Spectator in November 1962 (the article also appeared in the National Review in New York), in which Waugh not only made it clear that he wanted no liturgical changes whatever from the Second Vatican Council, which was then just beginning, but that he also deplored the restored Holy Week and Paschal liturgy introduced by Pope Pius XII. His reason for this regret is that hundreds of Catholics used to make an annual retreat in the monastery of their choice, beginning with Tenebrae on Wednesday afternoon and concluding about midday on Holy Saturday with the anticipated Easter Mass, and Waugh had noticed that the number of retreatants had dropped since the revised order of Pope Pius XII.
Perhaps that sets Waugh’s tone, or perhaps I am being unjust to take it as typical of his approach. But there is something unfortunate about the assumption that Holy Week should be ordered for the convenience of those who choose to make a retreat in a monastery on Holy Thursday and Good Friday. Retreats are excellent, but surely the ordering of Holy Week and Pascha must consider, above all, the situation of cathedrals and parish churches, where millions, rather than hundreds, of the faithful are likely to attend?
The present book concurs with Cardinal Heenan’s intervention at the Synod of Bishops in Rome, October 1967. Heenan opposed the so-called “Normative Mass”, which was to become the Novus Ordo of Pope Paul VI with some minor changes. Heenan’s criticism is indicative of his mind-set: “I cannot think that anyone with pastoral experience would have regarded the sung Mass as being of first importance... Our people love the Mass, but it is Low Mass without psalm-singing and other musical embellishments to which they are chiefly attached.” (pp 68-69)
The opinions of Waugh and Heenan, on one side, and the Roman Catholic liturgical establishment of Archbishop Bugnini and his collaborators on the other side, thus became a classic dialogue of the deaf. Strangely, however, both sides were agreed (though they may not have realised it - and the editor of the present book does not appear to realise it either) on the primary importance of Low Mass. Heenan and Waugh evidently regarded Solemn Mass (let alone Solemn Pontifical Mass) as an unpastoral, unimportant, trivial manifestation distinguished by “psalm-singing and other musical embellishments”. Bugnini and the Consilium were heavily influenced by the “dialogue Mass”, which itself was a form of Low Mass; the result was the Novus Ordo of Pope Paul VI, which has virtually abolished Solemn Mass.
Nevertheless, in different ways both Heenan and Waugh were correct in seeing some of the problems which were already manifesting themselves in the mid-sixties and which have since become much larger: the positive hatred of anything traditional, the near-prohibition of hieratic speech (even in vernacular languages), a new anti-clericalism which minimizes or flatly rejects the sacramental character of the priesthood, the effective denial of the Mass as a sacrifice in favour of a “social meal”... The book exemplifies the tragedy of the failure of liturgical conservatives thirty or forty years ago to engage in serious liturgical scholarship. When the moment came to implement the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, men such as Heenan and Waugh who could have made a valuable contribution, excluded themselves from the discussion and thus allowed the extremists of the other side to produce the Novus Ordo. Such are the bitter fruits of immobilism.
Archimandrite Serge Keleher is editor of The Eastern Churches Journal, works at the Keston Institute in Oxford and looks after a Greek Catholic congregation in Istanbul.
A GUIDE TO THE SACRAMENTS, John Macquarrie, SCM, London 1997, 245pp, £12.95
IN THIS book John Macquarrie gives both an introduction to sacramental religion and also a brief treatise on each of the individual sacraments, traditionally seven in number. I much enjoyed reading it, and I noticed that a number of lectures, addresses, and sermons that Fr Macquarrie has given over the past few years have, in fact, been also selections for this book. He himself will find the comparison over-blown, but I often think of Fr Macquarrie doing for Catholic Anglicanism and the various philosophers of our own day what St Thomas Aquinas did for the teaching of the medieval church and Aristotelian scholasticism. Thomas realised that Aristotelianism rediscovered, as it had been by the Western Church, was to be the philosophy of his day. So he presented the truths of theology in the philosophical terminology of the day. This was both academically and evangelistically necessary. The truths were unchanged. So in this book, as in much of his writings, Fr Macquarrie presents truths of theology, and, in particular, of the Anglican Catholic tradition in theological thinking, in the terminology and philosophical concepts of recent philosophical discussion. The truths, at least as far as I can see, are unchanged.
The first chapters, when Fr Macquarrie introduces the idea that the individual sacraments can only make sense once we have understood that we live in a sacramental universe (see chapter 1) and that Christ, our incarnate Lord, making God present to us, is the sacrament that lies behind all talk of seven sacraments (see chapter 4), also provide a good introduction to other discussions in modern theology. I particularly liked the idea of “a natural theology of the sacramental” (p 12).
The later chapters, as I have said, deal with the individual sacraments. The eucharist and order receive, as one might expect, more attention than the other particular sacraments. I found the chapter on eucharistic sacrifice especially useful. Fr Macquarrie rightly comments that “God does not need to be reminded of anything” (p141), but, of course, what we do in making remembrance before God in the eucharist continues the tradition of prayer in which saving deeds of the Lord were recounted in his worship to lay claim to his covenanted mercies. We see this tradition of prayer reflected in the psalms.
Two very minor quibbles: first, on page 107, is not Bultmann arguing that John was uninterested rather than disinterested in sacraments? “Uninterest” is not being concerned about something, whilst “disinterest” is not being biased about them. What Bultmann is surely arguing is that John is uninterested and that this lack of interest flows, not from a lack of bias, but from a very clear bias, a lack of disinterest. And second, I must admit that I think the use of the technical term res et sacramentum is occasionally incorrect. I had always thought (and think I remember having been taught, and have taught in my turn) that the technical term sacramentum et res does not denote the totality of the sacrament (but see pp47,73) but rather denotes the reality (which signifies itself the res tantum, the giving of grace) signified by the outward sign (sacramentum tantum). So in every sacrament Thomas Aquinas identifies three ingredients, an outward sign (sacramentum tantum meaning ‘sign only’), an inward reality (res et sacramentum meaning ‘both reality and sign’), and an inward grace (res tantum meaning ‘reality only’).
But it is a splendid book, and I hope lots of people read it. It will certainly be on the booklists I give to students.
Fr Jeremy Sheehy is Principal of St Stephen’s House, Oxford.
GOSPEL PEOPLE? Evangelicals and the Future of Anglicanism, John Martin, SPCK, London, 1997, 224 pp, £9.99
JOHN MARTIN, editor of The Church of England Newspaper from 1988 to 1995, has produced a very readable addition to the burgeoning literature on evangelical Christianity, and in particular the Anglican variety. The book is clear and logical in its presentation, identifying key factors affecting evangelical self-definition, surveying the history of evangelicals within the Church of England, exploring the current issues facing the evangelical constituency, and reflecting upon the contributions evangelical faith and practice could make to the future of the Anglican denomination. Though it could hardly be described as an objective account, it is certainly written in an irenic tone.
Nevertheless, the book is seriously flawed at a number of levels. In the first place it is consistently inaccurate in detail. Amongst the errors I noted were:
? the summary of D. B. Knox’s view of revelation and the period of his tenure as Principal of Moore College in Sydney;
? the suggestion that the dispute between Whitefield and Wesley was over the extent of the atonement (p63);
? a repetition of the now discredited versions of the debate between Samuel Wilberforce and Thomas Huxley, which Martin presents as a debate between Wilberforce and Charles Darwin himself (p65);
? the suggestion that the ‘liberal evangelicalism’ which was opposed by the founders of BCMS ‘faded from the scene in little more than a generation’, when it is still alive today (p66);
? the inclusion of Alister McGrath in a list of people who represent an realignment in the field of biblical studies, when his field is historical and systematic theology (p74);
? the isolation of ‘the headship argument’ as the sole reason for evangelical opposition to the ordination of women (p111);
? a reiteration of the charge that in the past evangelicals have tended not to take ecclesiology seriously, when the truth is that there is a plethora of evangelical books on the subject which many refuse to take into account because these do not define the church in institutional terms or in terms of the episcopacy (p147);
? a caricature of evangelical engagement with the biblical text as purely rationalist and a product of the Enlightenment (p157);
? the suggestion that evangelicals oppose the practice of extended Communion ‘because it lacks the rich symbolism of the communion service where the bread is broken and the wine poured out’ (p185);
? the assertion that Anglicanism ‘has never sought to be a confessional church after the style of the Continental Reformation’, which both overlooks the variety within the Continental Reformation and raises questions about what Cranmer and his friends thought they were doing with the 39 Articles of Religion and why clergy were required to subscribe to them (p190);
? the antithesis created between an insistence on the Bible’s inerrancy and infallibility on the one hand, and its dual authorship (divine and human) on the other (p199);
? the description of the spot in Oxford ‘where the Reformation martyr, Bishop Hugh Latimer, died in the flames alongside Archbishop Thomas Cranmer and Bishop Nicholas Ridley (p209).
One or two minor inaccuracies may perhaps be excused but a looseness with the facts of this magnitude undermines confidence in the rest of the book.
A second weakness is the book’s employment of a largely sociological definition of evangelicalism. It surely is time we rejected the oft-repeated passage from the work by Mark Noll, David Bebbington, and George Rawlyk as thoroughly inadequate, if not misleading. Despite repeating the comment of Stephen Neill that evangelicals are not so much an ecclesiastical party as an assortment of doughty individuals (pp77, 188), the former is precisely the way they are portrayed throughout most of the book: a group characterised by loyalty to a particular religious culture or tradition together with various quasi-institutional ties. Yet few ‘evangelicals’ speak of their commitment to evangelicalism. Most have a different focus: on the sovereign God who has acted to redeem a people for himself in the person of his son Jesus Christ and who addresses his people today in his written word the Bible. They insist that people cannot be described as evangelical simply because of the circles in which they move, the college in which they were trained, the committees on which they sit, or even the programs which they endorse. ‘Evangelical’ is an adjective which belongs first and foremost to the teaching of Holy Scripture which focuses on the gospel of Jesus Christ and then secondarily to those who endorse and defend that teaching, allowing their lives (individually and corporately) to be shaped by it.
The consequences of this misunderstanding are quite horrendous. When evangelicalism is described as a party, it becomes possible to allow people to use the label ‘evangelical’ though they publicly reject aspects of God’s teaching in Scripture. What matters is that the person concerned still wants to be called an evangelical. It is considered uncharitable even to ask whether someone who, say, manufactures historical contexts in order to relativise the teaching of Scripture on a contentious issue might have called their own evangelical identity into question. The ‘party’ is broad enough to encompass radical disagreement. Comprehensiveness is now not only a characteristic of Anglicanism in general, but evangelical Anglicanism in particular. Martin himself explicitly endorses this, insisting that if evangelicals are to move forward and leave a lasting imprint on the Church of England, they will first need to discover a via media of their own (p190).
A third fundamental weakness is the way the book repeatedly becomes an apology for so-called ‘open evangelicalism’. Conservative positions are often caricatured in a sentence or two, with a generous sprinkling of adjectives such as ‘highly individualistic’, ‘rationalist’, and ‘Puritan’. In contrast a newer, broader approach is regularly expounded at length without any serious critique. This is most obvious in the section dealing with current debates (e.g. the discussion of ‘headship’ on p112 and the exposition of Michael Vasey’s views on homosexuality on p121). The presentation is decidedly one-sided and this unfairness can only contribute to the present climate in which ‘the gulf between conservative and open evangelicals is widening’ (p198).
Despite these and other serious reservations it is still worth reading this book, though make sure you have a pencil firmly in your hand. Questions need constantly to be asked about the criteria of selection and the evidence that is provided.
Mark Thompson is returning to Australia having completed his doctorate in 0xford.