In Communion with All the Past

by | Mar 1, 2015

David Jones in the Great War by Thomas Dilworth. Enitharmon Press (London), 2012. Cloth, 228 pp., £15.Nearly four decades after he left the trenches, the Anglo-Welsh poet-painter David Jones (1895–1974) declared that “the forward area of the West Front had a permanent...

Tolkien and the Great Tale

by | Feb 24, 2013

The Christian World of ‘The Hobbit’ by Devin Brown. Abingdon Press, 2012 193 pp., $14.99 paper.J. R. R. Tolkien’s fame as a founder of modern fantasy and as one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century is assured. But he is still often not recognized...

Signs of Contradiction

by | Jun 17, 2012

The Pen and the Cross: Catholicism and English Literature, 1850–2000 by Richard Griffiths. Continuum (London & New York) xii + 260 pp., $35 cloth, 2010.In 1989, Gregory Wolfe uttered a cri de coueur bemoaning academic neglect of the modern “Catholic Intellectual...

An Everlasting Man of Letters

by | Oct 30, 2011

G. K. Chesterton: A Biography by Ian Ker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), xiv + 747 pp., $65.00 cloth Among the genres in which G. K. Chesterton wrote was critical biography. With typical paradox, Chesterton defined two duties for such authors that seem...

Significance and Missteps

by | Mar 20, 2011

Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy: The Making of GKC, 1874–1908 by William Oddie. Oxford University Press (Oxford) ix + 401 pp., $50.00 cloth, $29.95 paper, 2008.The poet David Jones once called one’s formative period “the years of becoming.” William Oddie...