In this book I introduce extracts from the weekly letters I received from my father, Richard Milward, during my life as a Jesuit student both at Heythrop College in Oxfordshire and at Campion Hall, Oxford. In these extracts I have aimed at preserving what is at once personal and universal, as in them my father has expressed his own unique philosophy of life as well as his lovingly humorous description of an English family during the postwar years. In them, too, I reveal an influence on my own life and thoughts which may be said to antecede and to precede that of William Shakespeare.