This biography of Michael Scott, Anglican priest and anti-apartheid activist, is introduced by Desmond Tutu, and has a complicated history. The first attempt to write a biography of Scott, who died in 1983, was made in 1974 by Cyril Dunn who, according to Lewis Chester in the introduction, “confess[ed] himself defeated by the complexities of his subject’s personality” (xii). The task was taken over, along with Dunn’s notes, by Anne Yates, who had not yet completed a first draft when she died in 2000. It was finally completed by Chester, shortly before the original commissioning editor also died. The fact that the book is the work of three authors (two listed as co-author) may partially account for the patchy detail. Some sections, particularly those with letters as their primary source, are excellently realized, where others seem to remain in outline. Scott was a self-described difficult man. Chester’s decision to begin the book with his dying acknowledgement of this, and attribution of it to an early episode of sexual abuse, seems like an almost passive-aggressive displacement of responsibility for the failure of this thirty year project.

This biography of Michael Scott, Anglican priest and anti-apartheid activist, is introduced by Desmond Tutu, and has a complicated history. The first attempt to write a biography of Scott, who died in 1983, was made in 1974 by Cyril Dunn who, according to Lewis Chester in the introduction, “confess[ed] himself defeated by the complexities of his subject’s personality” (xii). The task was taken over, along with Dunn’s notes, by Anne Yates, who had not yet completed a first draft when she died in 2000. It was finally completed by Chester, shortly before the original commissioning editor also died. The fact that the book is the work of three authors (two listed as co-author) may partially account for the patchy detail. Some sections, particularly those with letters as their primary source, are excellently realized, where others seem to remain in outline. Scott was a self-described difficult man. Chester’s decision to begin the book with his dying acknowledgement of this, and attribution of it to an early episode of sexual abuse, seems like an almost passive-aggressive displacement of responsibility for the failure of this thirty year project.