Parting Words

'I don't know where to stop praising Benny and this amazing book...' - HEATHER MORRIS, The Tattooist of Auschwitz 'This book...is the stuff folk tales are made of. How wonderful that sometimes they are true' - MARTIN FREEMAN What a century of life experience can teach us about happiness, ambition, courage, love and how to make the most of the lives we've been given. How many people do you know grew up as a poor immigrant in America during the Great Depression, won a scholarship to Harvard Law School, landed on the beaches of Normandy on D Day, were present at the liberation of concentration camps including Buchenwald, Mauthausen and Flossenburg, held leading Nazis to account at the Nuremberg trials and have fought for an International Criminal Court to hold war criminals to account the world over? Now you know one. Benjamin Ferencz turned 100 in 2020. In this extraordinary book, he shares his remarkable life story and the nine humble, compelling and life-affirming lessons he's learned along the way that we can all harness for ourselves. 'Warm, wise and inspiring - a book for our times by one of the world's most remarkable human beings' PHILIPPE SANDS, author of East West Street and The Ratline 'Ferencz is a true survivor and Mensch! He has wonderful humour, patience and gratitude. The book is a "must read"'' DR EDITH EGER, author of The Choice and The Gift 'This is a life-affirming and beautiful book from a great human being. There are simple truths here to treasure' BART VAN ES, author of The Cut Out Girl 'I read this in one go and it felt like moments ... Here is wisdom stripped to the necessary minimum - spare but nutritious. This is the good stuff.' NEIL OLIVER

Valedictory addresses offer a way to conceptualize the relation of self to others, private to public, ephemeral to eternal. Whether deathbed pronouncements, political capitulations, or seafaring farewells, "parting words" played a crucial role in the social imagination of Victorian writing. In this compelling new book, Justin Sider traces these public addresses across a wide range of works, from poems by Byron, Tennyson, and Browning, to essays by Twain and Wilde, to novels by Dickens and Eliot. Ironically, while the Victorian era saw the loss of faith in a unitary national public, it asked poetry to address just such a public. Attending to the form, rather than the discursive content, of poets' engagement with public culture, Parting Words explains how the valedictory allowed Victorian poets to explore the ways their poems might be received by distant and anonymous readers in an emergent mass culture. Using a wide array of materials such as letters and reviews to describe the rapidly changing print culture in which poets were intervening, Sider shows how the growing diversification and destabilization of the Victorian reading public was countered by the demand for a public poetry. Characteristically, the speakers of Tennyson's "Ulysses" and Matthew Arnold's "Empedocles on Etna" imagine their farewells as simultaneous entrances into a public space where they and their readers, however distant, might yet meet. This new consciousness anticipated modernist poetry, which in turn used the valedictory to underscore the futility and alienation of such hopes.

This collection captures the voice and the vision of a treasured preacher, pastor, and bishop. And so for these past thirteen-plus years, if there has been one watchword on my lips it has been, “Please be patient with me, 'cause God isn't through with me yet.” And God still is not finished with me. Nor is God through with any of us yet. So I pray that you will continue to go from strength to strength, in God's joyful service as you are reshaped, remolded, reequipped and re-empowered in the days and weeks and months and years ahead.

'I don't know where to stop praising Benny and this amazing book' - HEATHER MORRIS, The Tattooist of Auschwitz 'This book...is the stuff folk tales are made of. How wonderful that sometimes they are true' - MARTIN FREEMAN 'An engaging book...There wasn't one anecdote or episode that didn't make you wish to hear more about it' - THE TIMES *** What a century of life experience can teach us about happiness, ambition, courage, love and how to make the most of the lives we've been given. How many people do you know grew up as a poor immigrant in America during the Great Depression, won a scholarship to Harvard Law School, landed on the beaches of Normandy on D Day, were present at the liberation of concentration camps including Buchenwald, Mauthausen and Flossenburg, held leading Nazis to account at the Nuremberg trials and have fought for an International Criminal Court to hold war criminals to account the world over? Now you know one. Benjamin Ferencz turned 100 in 2020. In this extraordinary book, he shares his remarkable life story and the nine humble, compelling and life-affirming lessons he's learned along the way that we can all harness for ourselves. *** 'Warm, wise and inspiring - a book for our times by one of the world's most remarkable human beings' - PHILIPPE SANDS, author of East West Street and The Ratline 'Ferencz is a true survivor and Mensch! He has wonderful humour, patience and gratitude. The book is a must read' - DR EDITH EGER, author of The Choice and The Gift 'This is a life-affirming and beautiful book from a great human being. There are simple truths here to treasure' - BART VAN ES, author of The Cut Out Girl 'I read this in one go and it felt like moments ... Here is wisdom stripped to the necessary minimum - spare but nutritious. This is the good stuff' - NEIL OLIVER

Daniel Whittaker has left some unusual instructions in his will: in order for his three children to get their share of the inheritance, they must hand-deliver twelve letters he has left with his lawyer. What significance did these strangers have to their father? Kelly, the youngest of the three, is intrigued by what they might learn about Daniel. For Richard, however, the exercise seems futile, especially when he has his own secrets to hide. And Evonne is still nursing her grief over her parents' attitude to her sexuality. As Daniel's children carry out his last wishes, each of them must confront their long-held images of their father, and reconsider their relationship with him. What they discover about his legacy will change their lives.