This is a welcome reissue, with a new brief preface, of a book first published in 1977, which rapidly became a classic in the genre of composite biography. Penelope Fitzgerald’s father, Edmund Knox (1881–1971), and his three brothers, Dillwyn (1884–1943), Wilfred (1886–1950), and Ronald (1888– 1957), were descended from families teeming with Christian missionaries and eccentrics. The boys—there were also two sisters, but they receive scant mention in this pre-P.C. work—inherited these qualities in abundance. Their father was the evangelical Bishop of Manchester, in the north of England, and the fascination of the story lies partly in watching the variety of ways in which heredity was shaped by circumstance. Ronald, convert to Catholicism, priest, and biblical scholar, is the best-known brother (the curious may find more about him in The New Criterion of September 1997). Of the rest, Edmund became the editor of the humorous weekly Punch; Dillwyn was a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, a classicist and cryptographer who cracked the codes used by the Nazi “Engima” machine; and Wilfred was an Anglo-Catholic priest and social crusader who ended his days as chaplain of Pembroke College, Cambridge. Brilliant members of a brilliant family, they led lives filled with shadows; for while Mrs. Fitzgerald—who herself died, sadly, this year just before this volume appeared—tells her story affectionately, with many entertaining and moving anecdotes, it is hard to resist the conclusion that something went wrong for each of these men.

An eccentric is always sure of