It is a truism that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. I have just published a book on monastic lessons, having visited ten monasteries round the world. The idea was based on a slim volume called A Time to Keep Silence by Patrick Leigh Fermor who sought what he called “clarity of spirit “in monastery sojourns.

I saw myself essentially as a travel writer and a reporter, encountering a way of life wonderfully antithetical to my own. Yet, now I am being interviewed about the book, The Interior Silence, and am asked if I have been changed by the experience of writing it.