Word: bellocs
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...heavy toll charges Alexander Graham Bell levied for his invention was a minor art form: good letter writers have no telephone. Nor should they have much modesty. Belloc had neither. Instead he had wit and character. A grumpy, opinionated man ("I want to tell the new Pope one or two things. I hope he believes them"), he also had a well-polished ego, solid as a brass in a church floor...
Poisonous Cads. As perhaps the ranking, and certainly the most rancorous, Roman Catholic man of letters in England, Belloc felt he was living in a "hostile society." Yet he confessed to an affection for England "so intense that it is actually physical" (despite the "bad cooking and the pro-bolshevist press"). When he wrote letters in verse to friends such as Diplomat-Poet Maurice Baring, he insisted that it was because he had no time to write prose. As he observed in his snaggly, almost indecipherable hand...
...small group of Catholics, including Convert Gilbert Keith Chesterton, occasionally got the best of Belloc. To this elite, as he called them, Old Gunner Belloc (he had served in the French artillery) felt free to unlimber a bristling battery of high-caliber snarls against his numerous enemies. They included "poisonous cads" (British peers), "blundering savages and cosmopolitan riff raff" (Russian Communists), "filthy greasy hot Armenians," the "German herd [who] do not reason . . . that is why they take refuge in music," "eunuchs," like Thomas Carlyle, or "screaming Eunuchs," like Hitler, and, of course, "damn fool Editors...
Wine Worship. As well he might, Belloc saw ruin coming to a divided Europe in the '20s and '30s. He was appalled by the Protestant aristocrats who ruled England's foreign policy and, he felt, knew nothing of the Catholic Continent. Things would have been different, he was sure, had the Stuarts kept their jobs. He decried also the English "illusion that the possession of wealth is an excellence, like courage, or charity." The U.S., where Belloc was a successful lecturer, fared little better; he called it "an amiable and pleasant lunatic asylum...
There is a good deal of homiletics and political woe-crying in his later letters, but Belloc was seldom a bore. With his grave devotion to his religion went a fanatical belief in wine, which he liked to drink "to the Glory of God and the confusion of my enemies." He was not halfhearted in his piety toward the stuff. Off and on, over 20 years, he polished a poem in praise of wine. He found it a symbol of the good things of life denied by Puritan religions or by "Islam, furtive enemy of the soul." He said...