Fr Ian Ker turned 80 at the end of August. In the course of a celebratory dinner at the Oxford & Cambridge Club, he was presented with a festschrift as a commemoration of a lifetime spent in the service of the Church through his scholarship, not least as the leading Newman scholar of our age. His biography John Henry Newman continues to stand as the definitive work on the most recent saint of the English-speaking world.
The idea of the festschrift emerged last September, when Serenhedd James (no stranger to these pages) mentioned to me that his former doctoral supervisor would reach his four score years the following August. Ever the journalist – alongside being in his own right a well-regarded historian of the 19th-century Church in Britain and its empire – he added that someone really ought to organise a festschrift for him.
