Leaving Alexandria: A Memoir of Faith and Doubt written and read by Richard Holloway (11hrs unabridged, Canongate ebook download, £14.99)
When Richard Holloway resigned after 14 years as Bishop of Edinburgh, liberal Christians were saddened but not surprised. His increasing agnosticism was no secret. He had written books about it: Crossfire: Faith and Doubt in an Age of Certainty (1988), Anger, Sex, Doubt and Death (1992) and more, but they were less confessions than intellectual debates. What makes Leaving Alexandria so powerful is its honesty, helped, it has to be said , by the fact that he reads it himself. He has a great voice. Here, you feel, is a sensitive man with a spiritual vocation who has spent his life struggling to conform to strict religious doctrines he cannot accept about women priests, gay marriage, adultery. In his 30 years as a parish priest at Old St Paul's, Edinburgh, in England and the US, Holloway understood the problems of minorities not from religious texts but from personal experience. He was 14 when the rector of St Mungo's in his home town, Alexandria, west of Glasgow, persuaded his parents to send him to Kelham Hall in Nottinghamshire, the mother house of the Society of the Sacred Mission, which prepared working-class boys for the priesthood. Had psychometric tests been around in 1947 they probably would have shown that he was unsuited for the church. Yet even in his deepest moments of self-doubt, he is glad that he took the spiritual "elsewhere" option. We should be too. If it is to survive, the Anglican church needs radical, progressive voices such as Holloway's. He is fascinated by the power of certain words: "pity", which eradicates hatred because it humanises both pitied and pitier, and "maybe", which also dampens hate and isn't a fixed or "punishing kind of word like conviction or certainty, right or wrong, infidel or enemy, or truth or inquisition or empire or revolution or purge or mother fucker. People have killed with those words on their lips … The word has to come first … that's why the people of the maybe are ineffective. They lack persecutory certainty because they're too aware of their own weaknesses and confusions to punish others for theirs. Maybe we should try and build our politics and religion on pliant and yielding words… It's a pity that people of the maybe are so few." If Holloway's is a maybe kind of religion then so, d.v., is mine. "Sitting in Old St Paul's nowadays, my religion pared to almost nothing, I can still remember," he writes. Fondly, I hope, as I will this book.
The Sun Hasn't Fallen from the Sky written and read by Alison Gangel (6hrs unabridged, Isis, £25.49)
Another moving Scottish memoir, this time about growing up in a Glasgow children's home, which, thanks to a piano teacher who spotted the author's innate musicality, had a happy ending. Whether the other kids under Aunty Vera, their sadistic housemother, fared as well is doubtful. For the first two years Ailsa, the young Alison Gangel, or "Puddin", as her loving but useless parents – alcoholic father, dysfunctional mother – call her, has her older sister Morag to protect her from the sexual overtures of loathsome 12-year-old Malkey. But Morag's own antisocial behaviour leads to her being moved to a stricter institution, and Ailsa has to fend for herself. She eventually wins a place at the Scottish College of Music, but not before she manifests disturbing symptoms of her own.
Macbeth by William Shakespeare, with Anthony Quayle, Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies and cast (3hrs unabridged, Harper, £7.64)
Not exactly a memoir but definitely Scottish, this vintage 1960 recording is to drama what Von Karajan conducting Beethoven is to music. You may prefer the Barenboim version last week at the Proms but sometimes you just want the good old-fashioned blood-and-thunder melodrama. Here it is with knobs on.
