The author writes with warmth, with learning, with passion and with humor. The reader can enter into something of the accumulated wisdom of an Order whose members ‘have carried out the same little series of exercises since the eleventh century’. Each season has its special appeal for Carthusians - as the Conferences on Mary and on John the Baptist in the Advent and Christmas seasons show. The great Sunday Gospels of Lent - the Transfiguration, the Samaritan woman at the well, the raising of Lazarus - are expounded; the Passion of Christ is the subject of meditations that are profoundly and sometimes startlingly direct in their candour.

Yet perhaps the most remarkable part of this unusual book the author’s capacity to speak at length and to the point about the Resurrection and the coming of the Spirit. Here, where Christian teachers and preachers have so often been either hesitant or dogmatically remote, we have someone who clearly participates in the mysteries of which he speaks. It is a priceless gift to us al.