“Incandescent Brilliance:” Churchill and Hilaire Belloc
“To Belloc this generation owes big glimpses of the Homeric spirit. His mission was to flay alive the humbugs and hypocrites and the pedants and to chant robust folk-songs to a rousing obligato of clinking flagons….” He later concluded that Liberal reforms merely offered the “propertyless worker perpetual security…in exchange for the surrender of political freedom.”
Excerpted and condensed from “Great Contemporaries: Hilaire Belloc,” for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. For the full article click here.
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Joseph Hilaire Pierre Belloc(1870-1953)—writer, sailor, poet, friend of Churchill—helped fuel Churchill’s passion for the survival of free government. Anti-statist, anti-collectivist and anti-establishment, he deplored the servitude of the industrial wage-earner and longed to reconcile his two great loves, “the soil of England and the Catholic faith.”
Born in France but educated at Birmingham and Oxford, he served with the French Artillery before becoming a naturalized British subject in 1902.…
