The Knox Brothers

Product Description
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, only her second book, Penelope Fitzgerald turned her novelist’s gaze on the quite extraordinary lives of her father and his three brothers. A masterly work of biography, within which we see Penelope Fitzgerald exercising her pen magnificently 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, preacher, wit, scholar, crime-writer and translator of the Bible.
A homage to a long-forgotten world and a fascinating account of the generation straddling the divide between late Victorian and Edwardian.
Review
‘Reading a Penelope Fitzgerald novel is like being taken for a ride in a peculiar kind of car. Everything is of top quality – the engine, the coachwork and the interior all fill you with confidence. Then, after a mile or so, someone throws the steering-wheel out of the window.’ Sebastian Faulks
‘Wise and ironic, funny and humane, Fitzgerald is a wonderful, wonderful writer.’ David Nicholls
‘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 20th century classic.’ Richard Holmes
About the Author
Penelope Fitzgerald was one of the most distinctive voices in British literature. The prize-winning author of nine novels, three biographies and one collection of short stories, she died in 2000.

Richard Holmes was born in London in 1945 and educated at Downside School and Churchill College, Cambridge.
In 1974 his Shelley: The Pursuit won the Somerset Maugham Award and was described by Stephen Spender as ‘surely the best biography of Shelley ever written’. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, was awarded an OBE in 1992 and the Biographers' Club Lifetime Services to Biography Prize in 2014.
He lives in London and Norwich with the novelist Rose Tremain.