Word: belloc
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
LETTERS FROM HILAIRE BELLOC (313 pp.)-Edited by Robert Speaight-McMillan...
...Hilaire Belloc...
These days, when getting a well-written letter in the mail is as rare as getting a refund from the tax collector, many readers will be happy to agree with Belloc's own estimate of himself. A self-described mixture of "Poverty, Papistry and Pugnacity," Belloc (who died in 1953) had a solemn high literary funeral last year in an authorized biography (TIME, April 22, 1957). Biographer Speaight found leftover material too good to forget, notably a big bundle of crotchety letters-which are a long way from the sort of garrulous guff women still write to each other...
...Reasons Why. Belloc was far from an unquestioning Catholic. Much as he respected the church's authority in theory, he tormented it mercilessly in practice. "Are we all Catholics here?" he asked, coming down to Friday breakfast in a Catholic country house. "Very well, I shall help myself to a large slice of ham." Proof of the Catholic Church's divine inspiration, he once said, "might be found in the fact that no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight...
...dying day (1953) Belloc never understood why Oxford's All Souls had refused to make him a Fellow, why editors were reluctant to put him on their staff, why people thought him biased, why Catholics were upset by his behavior, why Englishmen thought him un-English. Author Speaight's book tells the reasons why frankly and fully, but without ever belittling the genius of the man best remembered for his verse who wrote so prophetically in his ardent youth...