Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Helaire Beloc & the Archbishop

Did you know the immensely prolific Helaire Belloc (whose name I'm not sure I can spell) wrote not only comic verse but also biographies of Cranmer and Cromwell, amongst others?

Belloc says Cranmer’s Collects are the kind of things people give their lives to write.

The biography is apparently quite moving and a good fun read.

Apart from MacCullouch’s peerless Life, MacCullouch thinks Pollard’s biography is the outstanding one.

Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, his Book of Martyrs, is worth a read as in Elizabethan Archbishop Matthew Parker’s, The Antiquity of the English Church (orig. Lat.), which gives an account of all 69 Archbishops of Canterbury going back to Augustine. Parker was the 70th.

4 comments:

Ros said...

Hilaire Belloc. And no I didn't know, though I remember once listening to a Radio 4 programme about Mastermind in which Clement Freud said that he'd been asked to take part in a celebrity edition and chosen as his specialist subject the works of Hilaire Belloc, and then been slightly alarmed to find that these were much more extensive than the comic poems he (Clement) had learned as a child.

Ros said...

Incidentally, I don't think there's a 'u' in MacCulloch either.

Marc Lloyd said...

Yes, you are quite right, thank you, no "u". Apologies. If I knew how to, I might put a notice on the home page, "Sorry about my bad spelling. I am dyslexic." Is that making stupid lame excuses? I just can't be bothered to look everything up. Seems such a waste of time. And the spell checker on this blog site creator thingy is not the greatest.

Ros said...

Clearly.