Volume 32, Number 17 · November 7, 1985
A Cautionary Career
By Bernard McCabe
Hilaire Belloc
by A.N. Wilson
Atheneum, 398 pp., $17.95
Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953), the subject of a recent biography by A.N. Wilson, was probably best known in the first decades of this century as a polemicist and debater. He and G.K. Chesterton, the believers, would take on Shaw and Wells, the doubters, on public platforms and in the press. These encounters were high-spirited and often highly entertaining. But Belloc had many other careers: he was a novelist, a verse-writer, a journalist, and a self-appointed public defender of the Catholic faith. His early books on the French Revolution were taken seriously by historians, he was elected twice to Parliament, he helped launch many journals of opinion and edited some of them, he had a leading part in the political movement known as Distributism, and his travel books and occasional essays once had a very wide audience. Yet long before his death most of his more than 150 books were ignored or forgotten. He is mainly remembered today by those wise parents and fortunate children who have kept his marvelous comic verses—in books like The Bad Child's Book of Beasts—in print for nearly ninety years.
Review, 3863 words
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