Basil Hume was born George Hume in 1923 to a French Catholic mother and an English Protestant father. He was appointed the abbot of Ampleforth in 1963 aged 40, and became Archbishop of Westminster, the primal see for England and Wales, in 1976. He died in 1999. Anthony Howard was asked by three prominent English Catholics and Hume’s literary executors to write this, his official biography. Within the limitations inherent in ‘authorized’ biography, the book is proficient, methodical and entirely uncontroversial. It assumes some prior knowledge of the structure and organization of the English Catholic church, but is also reasonably accessible to an outsider (Howard himself is an Anglican-raised agnostic, as he points out in the preface). It succeeds in humanizing Hume; though it does not go so far as to give a sense of his inner life – but this would presumably be beyond the requirements of the sub-genre of authorized/official biography.

Basil Hume was born George Hume in 1923 to a French Catholic mother and an English Protestant father. He was appointed the abbot of Ampleforth in 1963 aged 40, and became Archbishop of Westminster, the primal see for England and Wales, in 1976. He died in 1999. Anthony Howard was asked by three prominent English Catholics and Hume’s literary executors to write this, his official biography. Within the limitations inherent in ‘authorized’ biography, the book is proficient, methodical and entirely uncontroversial. It assumes some prior knowledge of the structure and organization of the English Catholic church, but is also reasonably accessible to an outsider (Howard himself is an Anglican-raised agnostic, as he points out in the preface). It succeeds in humanizing Hume; though it does not go so far as to give a sense of his inner life – but this would presumably be beyond the requirements of the sub-genre of authorized/official biography.