The Knox Brothers

Description

This is Penelope Fitzgerald's biography of her remarkable family. "When I was very young I took my uncles for granted, and it never occurred to me that everyone else in the world was not like them." In this book, Penelope Fitzgerald turns her novelist's gaze on the quite extraordinary lives of her father and his three brothers. Within it we see Penelope Fitzgerald exercising her pen before she began her novel-writing career. Edmund Knox, her father, was one of the most successful editors of Punch. Dillwyn, a Cambridge Greek scholar, was the first to crack the Nazi's message decoding system, "Enigma", and in so doing, is estimated to have shortened the Second World War by six months. Wilfred became an Anglo-Catholic priest and an active welfare worker in the East End of London. Ronald, the best known of the four during his lifetime, was Roman Catholic chaplain to Oxford University's student body, as well as preacher, wit, scholar, crime-writer and translator of the Bible. This volume is a homage to a long-forgotten world and an account of the generation straddling the divide between late Victorian and Edwardian life.

Penelope Fitzgerald was one of the most elegant and distinctive voices in British fiction. The author of nine novels, she won the Booker Prize in 1979 for Offshore, and was shortlisted on three other occasions.

'A portrait of English intelligence, religion, eccentricity, pig-headedness and wisdom, written with directness and wit.' A.S. Byatt 'A funny, tender, clever book. A study in a lost civilisation... destined to become a twentieth century classic.' Richard Holmes