Of the spiritual odysseys which dominate the literature of nineteenth-century England, Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua is universally acknowledged as one of the greatest and yet one of the most difficult. Newman wrote the Apologia in 1864, as a reply to Charles Kingsley's attack on his veracity and that of his fellow Roman Catholic clergy; the following year he revised it extensively and thereafter amended new impressions almost until his death in 1890. This fine edition, long unavailable, has been reissued for the centenary; it includes all the variants resulting from Newman's revisions, in both the printed texts and the surviving manuscripts.

"The Idea of a University [is an] eloquent defense of a liberal education which is perhaps the most timeless of all [Newman's] books and certainly the one most intellectually accessible to readers of every religious faith and of none. . . . [O]nly one who has read The Idea of a University in its entirety, especially the nine discourses, can hope to understand why its reputation is so high: why the first reading of this book has been called an 'epoch' in the life of a college man; why Walter Pater thought it 'the perfect handling of a theory'; why the historian G. M. Young has ranked it with Aristotle's Ethics among the most valuable of all works on the aim of Education; or why Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch told his students at Cambridge that 'of all the books written in these hundred years there is perhaps none you can more profitably thumb and ponder.'" -from the introduction by Martin J. Svaglic