Seeing the works of the early decades of the twentieth century by Robert Hugh Benson and Hilaire Belloc as part of a living tradition of historical scholarship, we might hope that the revival of interest in their historical perspectives might prove inspirational to new generations of pioneering cultural figures in the twenty-first century. The reception [...]
All natural loves, even love of the land, must suffer death and burial in the raw world and the winter of this life. But Hilaire Belloc, who “received the sacrament of that wide and silent beauty” of his native Sussex at night, was confident that he would see it and his departed friends face to [...]
Hilaire Belloc’s “The Contrast” is a neglected study of America and Europe after the Great War. His sadness over the utter failure of Europeans to embrace their cultural patrimony and stand independently explains his later sympathy for Franco and Salazar, and his initial interest in Mussolini. The unimaginative always place a wall of separation between [...]
Why, one wonders, was Hilaire Belloc so wrong about World War One when he was so right about so many other things? The trouble with satire is that it is topical. It is a child of its time. It is similar to a fad or a fashion. It is very up to date. And the [...]
Hilaire Belloc’s final words of wisdom might enable us to become truly oriented, taking the right path at the right pace to the right place. How do we get to heaven? The answer, it seems, is on foot. Hilaire Belloc was a man of many talents and a man of many parts. He wrote poetry [...]
Hoffman Nickerson and a coterie of essayists in the 1920s and 1930s comprised the “Old Right,” a loose confederation of thinkers and writers animated by anti-modernism, suspicion of democracy, and worries over the debasement of Western culture. In 1934, the cartoonist David Low created the cartoon character of “Colonel Blimp,” an exaggerated caricature of older [...]
On the Twelfth Day of Christmas two of my great loves sent to me a couple of great meditations on the mystery of the Nativity. The first and better-known meditation is by T.S. Eliot, whose “Journey of the Magi” places the poet in the entourage of the Three Wise Men as they journey to Bethlehem. [...]
As one who has admired Hilaire Belloc for almost half a century, it is gratifying indeed to see such a revival of interest in this great and under-appreciated man of genius. For too long, he has walked in G.K. Chesterton’s shadow. Now, at last, he is emerging in his own right, basking in the light [...]
While Hilaire Belloc often describes the type of economy he is advocating as “distributist,” he also refers to it as “proprietary,” due to the idea that a truly free economy requires the widest distribution of private property as possible. The recent esays on distributism and the many comments in response raised a number of interesting [...]
Little has changed in the years since Hilaire Belloc departed bodily from King’s Land. The ghost of his powerful absence still dwells in his stead, and the mill that he restored stands tall and erect, and in full working order. The great hills of the South Country They stand along the sea; And it’s there [...]
The Church is not prison but liberation. It is the way of escape—from the cell of the self, from the solipsist nightmare, from the grubbiness of materialism, from the overwhelming fact, in every age, of sin and sorrow. The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845-1961: Newman, Hopkins, Belloc, Chesterton, Greene, Waugh, by Father Ian Ker [...]
The Catholic Church canonized Saints Thomas More and John Fisher in 1935, only two years after the appearance of "The English Way," a work edited by one of the most important Christian humanists and publishers of the twentieth century, Maisie Ward, and which looks at the lives, ideas, and deaths of the great Roman Catholic [...]
The legacy of great Catholic literature that England had bestowed upon civilization might have seemed to have died out by the end of the eighteenth century, but the apparent death of Catholicism was merely the prelude for a spectacular resurrection. It is often forgotten that the Catholic presence in England is older than England itself. [...]
Alexander Salter’s "The Political Economy of Distributism" is a much-needed scholarly work on the ideas of distributism, as presented in the writings of Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton. Written in such a way that it will pass muster in the ivory towers of academe, it is also accessible for any reader interested in politics and [...]