Richard Holloway is known as “the bishop who doesn’t believe in God”. He is also, according to The Tablet magazine arts editor Joanna Moorhead “one of the warmest, most thoughtful and most intelligent bishops” she has ever met.
Joanna has interviewed Holloway– now 91 – for this week’s Tablet to mark the publication of his latest book, the 33rd to date, titled Last Words (Swift Press, £16.99 and Tablet price, £15.29).
You can read all about his new book in this week’s print version of The Tablet, which is available in all good bookshops and at the bookstalls of local churches.
The pictures in the montage above are a few I pulled together quickly from my files of a man born into poverty in Random Street in Alexandria.
He made his way through life to become Bishop of Edinburgh in the Scottish Episcopal Church having once been a family member of St Mungo’s at Burnbrae in Alexandria.
Holloway is a great man and a great writer and I have been honoured to meet him from time at the Edinburgh Book Festival and other literary events in the capital.
If you’re local, you’ll love them, but their attraction goes far beyond nostaligia and the beautiful Vale of Leven.
Meanwhile, the Christian gospels can be read as stories, but also as memories, writes Richard Beard in this week’s print Tablet.
The Evangelists – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John – make early moves towards the genre of memoir. And like memoirists ever since – pace The Salt Path controversy – the gospel writers and their scribes exposed themselves to accusations of fabrication.
But unlike today, the gospel writers did not have to contend with “editors focused on the market or hopes for a lucrative film,” writes Beard, a novelist who has devised an ingenious form of memoir: it involves 64 chapters patterned onto an online chessboard.
“Each chapter is denoted by a square on the board (on the screen of a phone, or a computer) and behind each square are 1,000 words for each year of my life,” he explains.
Bill Heaney