Confessions: Life Re-examined

Edward Stourton

Penguin Doubleday, £20, 304 pages

Edward Stourton, the distinguished broadcaster from an eminent Catholic dynasty, has titled his memoir Confessions: Life Re-examined. On the first page of the book Stourton discloses his second round of chemotherapy, and that he has been living with cancer for seven years. “It seems likely I will be able to stretch my life to the biblical three score years and ten,” he writes (he is now 65), “but I shall probably not celebrate my 80th birthday”.