Letters - 04 September 2026
'In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity.'
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Tony Parker
Thank you, Jonathan Doering, for your fine article on Tony Parker (21 August). I too was deeply influenced by his writing and outlook. I first learned of him, while still a student, as the author of two BBC Plays for Today: When the Bough Breaks (1971) – about an NSPCC social worker – and A Life Is Forever (1972) – about the killer of a policeman starting his life sentence. I became a social worker myself and the ‘lifer’ play was one of several things at the time which kindled my interest – lasting, as it turned out – in prisons and prisoner autobiographies.
I caught up with his earlier books and, probably like many people of my generation, they shaped my sympathetic but unsentimental understanding of lawbreakers as people, all useful for what I went on to do professionally. Using the then new technology of portable tape recording, Tony Parker had a matchless gift for listening, drawing out stories and assembling material in ways that engaged the mind and pierced the heart. I appreciated the Quaker/pacifist influence on his formation only after I had joined Friends, but in retrospect it made perfect sense.
The most searing of his books, for me, was the The Violence of Our Lives (1995), based on interviews with life-sentence prisoners in the USA. As far as one can ever understand violence from a book, this is still the one to read. Compared to Parker’s work, most of the contemporary true crime genre is deeply impoverished, sensational and nihilistic, as pernicious in its cultural impacts as Parker’s were sober, realistic and hopeful. He has had some imitators, but not many.
Over the years I accumulated the whole shelf-full of Parker’s books on people and places. I learned wisdom from them all. I knew of two formidable chief probation officers in the 1990s who said they had first joined the probation service because of Tony Parker, but his influence as a writer must be inestimable. To learn that Jonathan Doering read The People of Providence as an A-level student is another wonderful instance of that – all credit to his English teacher. I could not tell my own story in criminal justice without mentioning the part Tony Parker’s writing played in it.
Mike Nellis
Love in action
I was interested in the letter from Keith White (21 August). I have struggled for most of my ninety years with the word ‘God’. I delayed applying for membership because of this, until I realised that, with Quakers, I would be accepted and could make my spiritual journey in their company. An overseer said, ‘Are you looking for God out there? He is within you.’
But recently it dawned on me that God is Love. I’d always known it, but you could say the penny dropped. Love is what I try to live my life by. God/Love is my compass by any name. I discern where my love is needed, making that telephone call; sending a WhatsApp message; being sensitive to other people’s hurt or stress, suggesting a coffee together. Something as small as this is Love in action. My favourite prayer is ‘Christ has no hands on earth but yours; no feet but yours…’ When I was bringing up my four young children, an older Friend would cycle the two miles to pick up my ironing. I couldn’t pass on her love at that time, but later I was able to do so.
Judith Taylor
