Word: belloc
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Oldtimers insist that this anecdote has symbolic significance. In just such a way, they remark, did the rough & ready young Belloc, "fully armed and uttering war cries like Athena" (in the words of the London Times) invade "the startled, insular world of late Victorian Oxford." While he laid about him, buffeting the dons, intoning ballads and drinking songs, dominating political and religious debate, Britons soothed themselves by reflecting that he was, after all, a bit of a foreigner. For every true Briton believes at heart that whenever his peace is disturbed by uncompromising passion and brilliance, foreign blood is bound...
...Sussex Garden. Hilaire Belloc, now 81, has spent a long and distinguished career living up to his countrymen's expectations about hyphenated Englishmen. Though he has lived in Sussex for 46 years, he insists that he always feels like a Frenchman there, and that it is only by crossing over to France that he can feel like an Englishman. An ardent Roman Catholic, he has treated the Church of England not as a holy keystone of British tradition but as a disastrous heresy. And finally, while he has pleased the British by insisting that he is a mere "hack...
...writers have given more for less money. Of Belloc's 100-odd volumes of prose and poetry (the first, Verses and Sonnets, was published in 1895) only two or three have been bestsellers. Such books as The Path to Rome, Richelieu, Marie Antoinette, and Cautionary Verses still sell well enough for Belloc to be able to drink good French wine. But the slight look of shabbiness about his 15th Century Sussex house, King's Land, shows the slimness of the owner's purse. The furnishings of the old house have been neither changed nor moved since...
...Belloc, a shrunken figure who walks his garden in a black cloak, has not practiced his "stinking trade" ever since the death of his son Peter...
...Edwardian Debate. The Belloc with whom posterity will reckon does not belong to this era at all. He belongs to those Edwardian days when the wiseacres said of him-as they said of Churchill-that his very brilliance would be his undoing. For Belloc could write like an angel, sail a yacht like an old salt, take to the hustings like a born politician (he was a-Liberal M.P. for South Salford from 1906 to 1910). He turned out books at the rate of two or three a year-poems, novels, histories and essays of such diversity that, as early...