Word: speaight
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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LETTERS FROM HILAIRE BELLOC (313 pp.)-Edited by Robert Speaight-McMillan...
...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 or the kind of bulletin businessmen confide to the uncritical tape...
...matters involving courage, honesty and humor, the late Hilaire Belloc was the best judge of British character that France ever produced. But in most other aspects of life, he was one of the worst. In this authorized biography, Author-Actor Robert Speaight. an Anglo-Catholic, presents Belloc in all the fullness of flesh and mind...
...Spot. Out of his blended love for "the Guns," scholarship and French history came his brilliant biographies of Danton, Robespierre, Marie Antoinette and his vivid studies of warfare. During World War II, recalls Author Speaight, General Bedell Smith, Chief of Staff to General Eisenhower, asked for a copy of Belloc's Six British Battles. "That is the man I want to read," he said; "he has studied the thing on the spot...
...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...