article in ecclesiastical circles might have been predicted, the secular press turned the issue into front page news. The papers latched on to his criticisms of Runcie, yet the preface was far more critical of the liberal Bishop of Durham, David Jenkins, and the Bishop of Newark, John Shelby Spong. After a number of days of fevered speculation, it emerged that Bennett was the anonymous author and the last entries in his diary make clear that he was finding the attentions of the tabloid press increasingly difficult to cope with. Between 5 December 1987, when he was last seen alive, and 7 December, when his body was found, Bennett killed himself at 15, Moody Road, Oxford. His death and the events which led up to it continue to divide those who take an interest in church matters. Conservative Anglo-Catholics and many others opposed to the ordination of women view Bennett as a martyr, hounded to his death by the machinations of the Church of England "spin machine" for saying something that everyone believed to be true. Liberals, while agreeing that his death was a tragedy, point to Bennett being not without his problems and having recently lost his mother, to whom he was particularly close. Evaluation Bennett's Crockford preface came at a time when the issue of the ordination of women to the priesthood was becoming a more divisive issue in the Church of England than it had perhaps been up to that point. The main book on the Bennett affair, William Oddie's The Crockford Files, highlights this as a primary frustration for Bennett but also considers other factors, such as the gradual emergence after the 1960s of trends – for example the non-realist theology of Don Cupitt – which traditionalists considered detrimental to the faith of the church. Bennett aligned himself to the Anglo-Catholic wing of the church and had strong links with Pusey House, Oxford, and the clergy who staffed it and made that alignment consciously and "not without reservations". At the time Bennett wrote his preface (which covers a wider range of topics than the disproportionate amount of coverage given to the "An Archbishop in toils" section suggests), opposition to the ordination of women to the priesthood had not been centralised – the traditionalist group Forward in Faith did not become established until 1992. It is, therefore, a matter of conjecture how he would have moved had