Pope Leo XIV: The Biography. Elise Ann Allen (Ebury Vine, £25)
It’s not quite true, as a sticker on the cover of Pope Leo XIV suggests, that this is the Pope ‘in his own words’. The subtitle, ‘The Biography, as told to Elise Ann Allen’, conveys the idea that the Pope is dictating to the author. That, if true, would be quite something. What she does have is the benefit of two in-depth interviews with him after his election, as well as encounters in Lima and Rome. After he was appointed head of the Dicastery for Bishops in Rome, she and her husband, the late Vatican correspondent John Allen, invited Robert Prevost to dinner, and he turned out to be the perfect guest: he made jokes, ate everything and was good company. That was a lucky initiative.
