Sir Geoffrey Faber's Oxford Apostles, a character study of the Oxford Movement, is not, in the usual sense of the word, a 'religious' book. It is primarily an attempt to understand and to explain a deeply interesting crisis in the history of ideas, by a study of personalities.
The central figure in this study is Newman, whose life is traced in detail up to the point of his conversion to Roman Catholicism. Round him are grouped a number of other men, whose careers and characters are presented with equal vividness - Keble, Pusey, Froude, Whatley, Blance White, Hampden and many others of lesser significance. The author combines these various life-stories with great skill into a single dramatic and moving form; and his expositions of the ecclesiastical and political background of early nineteenth-century Oxford, and of the general characteristics of the movement, hold the reader's attention.
First published in 1933 this remains an authoritative work.