Celebrating England’s long tradition of tolerance towards unconventional men of the cloth, these short biographies describe how clergy have displayed their own unique forms of holiness by treading ‘the thin line between prophet and clown’. The peculiar parsons include a mermaid-impersonator, a collector of French pornography and the incumbent who surrounded his vicarage with barbed wire – not to mention the infamous Vicar of Stiffkey, whose performance as Daniel in a den of real lions brought predictably fatal results.