Hilaire Belloc’s Canterbury Tale
In 1905, just before he entered the House of Commons for four discouraging years (1906-1910), Hilaire Belloc published a variegated and copious book, entitled The Old Road, about his eight-day journey...
View ArticleG.K. Chesterton in Praise of Chaucer
In 1932, four years before his death and only ten years after his having entered the Catholic Church, G.K. Chesterton wrote a vivid and capacious book on the medieval Catholic poet, Geoffrey Chaucer...
View ArticleThe Intellectual Magnanimity of Chesterton and Belloc’s Humor
On this manifold Sacred Feast Day, we propose to offer a perhaps unexpected, but quite illuminating contrast with the honored historical figure of Saint Joan of Arc, Virgin—who was killed by the...
View ArticleMaurice Baring’s Memorable Perceptions of War
After considering several varied, but representative, insights from Maurice Baring’s 1905 book, With the Russians in Manchuria, we shall be even more grateful to reflect upon the admonitory conclusions...
View ArticleBaring, Dostoievski, and the Prevaricating Press
In 1927—some twenty-three years after the Menshevik Revolution and a decade after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia—Maurice Baring published an anthology of his earlier writings, entitled What I Saw...
View ArticleBelloc’s Verse on Our Lady and the Challenge of Faith
As we ourselves gratefully remember Hilaire Belloc this year, especially on the 60th Anniversary of his death, let us first consider “Courtesy,” his brief and evocatively allusive poem of seven short,...
View Article‘The Penalties of Truth’ and Belloc’s Traveller
It is often the case, well known to the close readers of Hilaire Belloc’s varied essays, that he surprises us with some of his profoundest reflections and most memorable formulations in those lighter...
View ArticleNeither Communism Nor Capitalism — a Christian Society
Review of Solzhenitzyn, A Soul in Exile, by Joseph Pearce. Ignatius Press, 2012. Having recently been in a Russian kind of mood after my review of Dr. Warren Carroll’s 1917, Red Banners, White Mantle,...
View ArticleThe Disadvantages of Comfort
When an inspiring Scottish friend recently teased me with a trenchant quote from John Henry Newman’s sermon, entitled “Religious Cowardice,” I deployed my resourcefulness promptly to find, if I could,...
View ArticleDostoievsky’s Prince Myshkin, “The Idiot”
After reading together with my wife last night our Austrian friend Friedrich Romig’s carefully crafted and profound review of a 2013 book in German by Botho Strauss, we even started to consider, in...
View ArticleLongfellow and the Faith
And in despair I bowed my head “There is no peace on earth,” I said, “For hate is strong and mocks the song Of peace on earth, good will to men.” Then pealed the bells more loud and deep: “God is not...
View ArticleMaurice Baring’s Insights on the Russian Character
How might a deeply reflective book of almost four hundred pages written by a Catholic Englishman some seven years before the 1917 Communist Revolution in Russia — and thus also seven years before Our...
View ArticleG.K. Chesterton’s View of Tolstoy’s Aspiration to Simplicity
When in 1902 G.K. Chesterton first published his essay “Tolstoy’s Cult of Simplicity” in a book of twelve of his collected essays, he was only twenty-eight years of age, and it was then only two years...
View ArticleA Synopsis of the Sixteen Novels of Robert Hugh Benson
Ann Applegarth, Catholic World Report: An impressive list. And, unlike many “Christian”—even “Catholic”—novels that may entertain yet contain no insight whatever into the human condition, Benson’s...
View ArticleEvelyn Waugh’s The Loved One
While recently re-reading—after almost forty-five years—Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One, his piercing 1948 novel set in the United States—in Southern California, in and around Los Angeles and Hollywood—I...
View ArticleChesterton’s Defense of a Lady and Her Pet
Even in G.K. Chesterton’s little essay “On Pigs as Pets,” a reader will soon deeply sense that the writer is a man of gratitude; and that both his chivalrous tone on behalf of an elderly lady and his...
View ArticleCardinal Manning: Honour
While attempting to retrieve a memorable 1909 Hilaire Belloc essay (“The Missioner”) for a College student — to be then conveniently found in a 1926 Anthology entitled Representative Catholic Essays —...
View ArticleThe Slow Fruitfulness of His Heart of Mercy: L. Brent Bozell, Jr.
Through the prompt kindness of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, I recently received a gift copy of Daniel Kelly’s book that they had just published on L. Brent Bozell, Jr., entitled Living on...
View ArticleMaurice Baring Presents Xantippe
This short essay proposes to consider, not only the above-mentioned Major B.K. and General de Castelnau, but also Maurice Baring himself, as “one of God’s gentlemen,” as one whose own generous and...
View ArticleJoseph Pearce and the ‘Boromir’ Option
The Imaginative Conservative, Joseph Pearce: In a recent essay for the Imaginative Conservative I wrote about what I called the Mercutio Option, based on the character in Romeo & Juliet who cursed...
View Article
