With due deference to the originator of the latest foray in to the world of Father Brown, I doubt many devotees of GK Chesterton’s clerical detective would find the portrayal of the character by Mark Williams to be excellent. The BBC series, now in its ninth season and popular as it appears to be, is such a travesty that Chesterton would recognise neither his fictional hero nor its non-fictional model. Yet it is testimony to the fact that the Father Brown phenomenon, for want of a better word, continues to prosper more than a century after its first appearance in 1911. This new devotional anthology, edited by Stephen Poxon, is a further witness to the fact.