[citation needed] Described by Michael J. G. Pahls as "[t]he standard [English-language] account of the First Vatican Council",[4] the book is based on the correspondence of Bishop William Bernard Ullathorne of Birmingham.

[8] His mother came from a Norman Irish Catholic family and was a sister of the eminent consulting physician Sir Francis Cruise.

[9] During his time at the school, he was greatly influenced by the Benedictine priest William Petre who, along with the prior, Bernard Murphy, advised him as he discerned his vocation.

[10] As his parents did not want him to enter the Benedictine noviciate immediately after finishing at Downside, he spent a brief period at the short-lived Catholic University College in Kensington, London, as well as travelling throughout Europe.

I remember shortly after my entrance saying to an old school friend among the juniors that I should not have been surprised at anything I found at Belmont – not even at perpetual abstinence or silence, or midnight office.