Word: knoxes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Monsignor Ronald Knox was skittish about moths, mice and telephones. He was at his ease among pogo sticks (once he navigated a flight of stairs on one), the pipe smoke and verbal parry of Oxford common rooms, Latin verse and the English language. Temperamentally an esthete, he nonetheless made sense and clarity the chief goals of his monumental translation of the Bible. Intellectually the most ornamental English convert to Roman Catholicism since John Henry Newman, he was too diffident and self-effacing to aspire to a cardinal's red hat. His was the subtler role of a kind...
Seven years before his death in 1957, Knox appointed one such friend, Evelyn Waugh, novelist and fellow convert, as his literary executor. In Monsignor Ronald Knox (Little, Brown; $5), Biographer Waugh guards his friend's privacy like a medieval moat; whenever the book becomes personal, it is full of private jokes. Waugh's portrait is curiously Graham Greene-like, with Knox's outward urbanity masking a certain amount of inner anguish, his scrupulous conscience making him uneasy at any ease of faith...
Virgil at Six. For Ronald Arbuthnott Knox, religion was the family vocation. Both his grandfathers were Anglican prelates, and his father became Bishop of Manchester in 1903. The youngest of four brothers and two sisters, little Ronald was left motherless at four and became a precociously scholarly tot. At six, he could read Virgil, knew Latin and the Bible thoroughly. At Eton he copped almost every prize except the Newcastle scholarship; the boy who beat him crammed so hard that all his hair fell out. No crammer, Ronald was a bit of a prankster. He particularly disliked Classmate Hugh Dalton...
Incense for Paw. At Oxford, Ronald Knox was briefly "infected" with the impediment of Fabian socialism. He shortly parodied his drawing-room-pink period...
...Knox had yet to feel any sense of religious vocation, but he had more than the nominal teen-ager's attraction to the religious life. At 17 he made a vow of celibacy: "The uppermost thought in my mind was not that of virginity . . . I must have 'power to attend upon the Lord without impediment...