"To me, on coming from a radically iconoclastic Protestant sect, the holy pictures and statues the Christian Brothers had crammed on every wall seemed utterly bizarre.
Although he feels he escaped "the deep imprinting on the psyche of Catholic guilt", Williams was captivated by "those gothic images and rigid doctrines": "An absolute scale of values and vision is insinuated into one's mind" which may account "for the number of Catholics who become writers or artists".
He was one of the editors of The World Novel to 1950, a volume of the Oxford University Press series The History of the Novel in English.
[1] Williams is one of the first academics to focus his publications predominantly on contemporary New Zealand writing.
[4] In November 2012, with his wife and fellow Victoria academic, Jane Stafford, Williams published a major anthology of New Zealand literature.