Strange Glory

. This elegantly written biography offers the most intimate, detailed, rounded and supremely human portrait yet painted of the great Christian thinker and martyr . Draws on writings only recently made accessible - including the correspondence between Bonhoeffer and his teen-age fiancé, Maria von Wedemeyer . Fresh insights into the duplicity into which Bonhoeffer was drawn, with intriguing quotes from the bogus diary and letters he composed to distract the Gestapo from his real activities . Packed with fascinating extracts from Bonhoeffer's own letters and papers, creating a vivid sense of the momentous times in which he lived, and of his innermost thoughts and feelings at any given moment 'A good biography takes a reader beyond the life of its subject into the times and places in which they lived. A great biography can leave us with the impression we know a stranger better than we know our friends. Charles Marsh's biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer does all these things. No recent biographer of Bonhoeffer knows his theology or his historical and intellectual context better than Charles Marsh who has, for the past two decades, been the finest Bonhoeffer scholar of his generation. Yet none of this would matter if one did not want to turn the pages. Strange Glory tells Bonhoeffer's story with accuracy and insight but more than that, it is a joy to read.' Stephen J. Plant, Dean of Trinity Hall, Cambridge