Usual witty language from the Economist’s review of the Pontifex maximus’s autobiography, Hope. We are told that “He is very nice, very kind and very, very boring”.
The very best autobiographies … take the humdrum daily detail of life, fillet, shape it and so, says Mr Douglas-Fairhurst, “redeem all that chaos”. The pope’s biography does not do this. It gives the reader a mass of detail: trousers, pizza, his parents’ first address. But it does nothing with this. As a result, this biography of a pope offers, ironically, no redemption—and precious little sense of the man himself. The devil, as always, is in the details. The pope, alas, is not.
No doubt will be a big seller, but not as big as that other book.