A Writer in the Times Literary Supplement (29 January, 1949) devoted the whole middle page to a study of Hilaire Belloc, and gave sufficient praise to his prose but seemed to think his historical writing of little importance. The writer is generous in his appreciation of Mr Belloc as a man and of much that he stood for: ‘It was an old joke against Mr Belloc that he not only spoke for Europe but he wrote as if he was Europe. Where is the joke now? The Europe he spoke for is shrinking fast, as he warned us. We may still reject his remedies: but Catholics and Protestants both now contemplate with dismay the threat to displace the icons of the Faith for the icons of the Kremlin, the Bible for Das Kapital.’ That is finely said and is worth repeating. He concedes that Mr Belloc had ideas, whether we think them right or wrong, and ‘Ideas are rare and become rarer, especially when they are based on experience, on a strong sense of fact’. That, too, is generously said, and is true. The writing of so many modern historians suggests nothing so much as the regurgitation of sawdust. But, the writer seems to think that Belloc’s History of England, his books on Wolsey, Cranmer and Cromwell are of little account: ‘ (they) have all the thrill that vigour of presentation can give to conviction. Still, they throw more light on their author than on the subject.’ (It is odd that the writer nowhere mentions Belloc’s French Revolution studies).