'Towards the end of Brenda Niall’s new book My Accidental Career she muses on her reluctance to insert herself into her biography of Judith Cassab and the authority that allowed her to do so in her biographies of Archbishop Mannix and Irish Jesuit William Hackett. She says, ‘When it came to Hackett and Mannix, I was back in a world that I remembered well. I had the right to speak’. ' (Introduction)