Category: Literature

Significantly, Dell launches into a full-throated defence of the truth of all religions (20): which makes one wonder why he converted to Catholicism. Fr Yolland sees that his friend is […]

When Fr Yolland opens the package of all Dell’s worldly belongings he finds: … a neat pile of pyjamas—silk, for he felt them incredulously—a spotless collar, an Indian silk tie, […]

When Fr Yolland first glimpses the shadowy figure of Christopher Dell, the latter is striking a pose, and his mouth and chin “seemed tilted in a kind of tragic appeal.” […]

Robert Hugh Benson’s The Sentimentalists, was published in London by Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons Ltd., 1906. Pitman himself (1837-1897) invented Pitman shorthand, and distance education using the English postal […]

I am reading Robert Hugh Benson’s early novel By What Authority?  One of RBH’s strong suits as a novelist is his graceful employment of an extraordinarily wide vocabulary: his use of […]

This anecdote about Walter Scott, otherwise unknown to me, is extracted from the writings of Mary Josephine “Maisie” Ward 1889-1975, who had the signal honour to be the great-great-granddaughter of […]

Many readers do not like Anne of Geierstein (1829). Schoolchildren who were obliged to read it are said to have been turned many readers off Walter Scott’s novels altogether. I […]

Walter Scott’s 1820 novel, The Abbot, has fared rather better with critics than with the reading public. I am one amateur critic who also likes it, although I would not […]

Why do most commentators undervalue Sir Walter Scott’s short novel, A Legend of the Wars of Montrose (1819)? I wonder if it is not because of the Catholic sympathy he […]