It is not yet four years since Mr Belloc died. He left a vast and varied opus; a collection of friends almost as diverse as his books; a legend; and an enormous quantity of diaries and papers. It is astonishing that in so short a time Mr Speaight should have been able to work through so many sources of information, assess their relevance, extract what was of value, bring the legend into focus in the man, and write this admirable study, objective, affectionate, detailed and just. He has handled his great and complex task with detachment, and has succeeded in doing something which must have been very difficult indeed; that is, in describing the multifarious events and labours and interests and adventures of Belloc’s torrential, centrifugal life, without ever obscuring his unity of character, centripetal in religious loyalty. He is seen, first and last, as a single human being; not as a volcano in ceaseless highly unpredictable eruption. This means, of course, that some of his personal impact is diminished; but many vivid impressions or that impact are available, with J. B. Morton’s memoir as the most intensely vital of them all. The present biography is the first to give the facts, the documents, the time sequences, which form the bony structure of that long and vigorous life. For the most part Mr Speaight stands well away from his subject matter, and records without comment both the attractive and the unsympathetic aspects of Belloc. His childlike goodness and generosity and loyalty emerge, his overwhelming vitality, ‘the spouting well of joy within’, his capacity for friendship and singing and laughter; and so do his anti-semitism (neither soft-pedalled nor excused, but traced to French influences in his youth, especially that of the Collège Stanislaus where he spent some formative months) and his lack of imaginative sympathy.

The triumphal re-entry of the Emperor Haile Selassie I into his capital of Addis Ababa on May 5, 1941, marked the beginning of a new era for the Catholic Church in Ethiopia. As in many countries today in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, the Church in Ethiopia has to prove that it is truly a supranational and independent body, notwithstanding its spiritual allegiance to the Holy Sec. The Italian missionaries who followed in the wake of Mussolini’s armies in 1935 could not but help to identify the Catholic faith with the Italian religion in the eyes of the invaded Abyssinians, and not least because French Catholic missionaries who had laboured for years in this territory’ were politely but firmly shown the way out of the country during the Duce’s occupation. As could be predicted, the return of the Negus and the allied armies led to the expulsion of the Italian missionaries from Ethiopia. Not a single one was allowed to remain and the Apostolic Delegate, Mgr Castellani, himself an Italian Franciscan, was conducted out of the country by English officers. To this day, no Italian missionary is allowed inside the Emperor’s dominions.

A knowledge of the history of Christianity in Ethiopia, essential for an understanding of the situation today, can be briefly summarized. The Church was established in the fourth century by St Frumentius who was consecrated first Bishop of Aksum by the great Doctor of the Church, St Athanasius of Alexandria. The Church in Ethiopia unhappily fell away into the monophysite heresy, gradually cutting all links with Rome and Constantinople but maintaining important relations with what became the dissident Coptic Church of Alexandria. The national Church of Ethiopia, comprising about seven and a half million adherents, remains monophysite in doctrine to this day, although it can be reasonably argued that Ethiopian monophysitism is more nominal than real.

Even if we assume the obvious, namely that the insurrection in Hungary was immediately motivated by previous developments in Poland, our assumption still begs the question. How could the Hungarian people muster such a valiant spirit of defiance in the face of Russian tanks, artillery fire and aerial bombing overnight, after the long years which must have appeared to die impartial observer as inglorious submission? After all, there was an active resistance in Poland in 1945-46 and even General Mihailovitch managed to continue for a while his resistance against Tito in the Yugoslavian mountains. Czechoslovakia, although by peaceful means, maintained her partly Western orientation until the beginning of 1948.

During all these years between 1945 and 1948 the Magyars appeared docilely to accept their submergence behind the iron curtain, the open Communist flouting of the anti-Communist popular vote at the General Elections in 1945 and 1947, Rákosi’s ‘salami tactics’ to reduce the Smallholder Party’s parliamentary majority, the liquidation of the Ferenc Nagy Government, the imprisonment of the Protestant Bishop Ordass and Cardinal Mindszenty.

However profound the impact of the Polish developments on Hungary may have been, particularly in view of the centuries-old Hungaro-Polish sentimental attachment, could the news from Warsaw have changed the national character of the Magyars in a matter of a few hours? Of course not! If we seek to explain the contrast between the Hungarian attitude before and after October 23, 1956, we must go back a few years in history to show that Hungary’s loss of independence came about with a slow graduality which precluded any spontaneous resistance in the past.

Inflation has been one of the most serious and persistent of our post-war economic problems. Few people however take it seriously, for despite die repeated balance of payments crises it has produced, the threatened disaster has not overtaken us. Many indeed attribute the maintenance of full employment to the same forces that have produced inflation. They recognize that inflation may have incidental evils, but in their fear of unemployment they hesitate to adopt certain kinds of measures that may be necessary for the control of inflationary forces.

Inflation raises both economic and moral problems. It is the economic aspects that must be studied first, for without an understanding of how inflation comes about it is impossible to consider the moral problems associated with the process; nor can questions of social justice be discussed without a knowledge of the effects of inflation.

Inflation is a situation in which there is a general rise in prices as a result of an excessive demand for goods and services. When the demand for any commodity increases (or the supply of it is restricted) there is a tendency for the price to rise. When the overall demand for goods increases and the supply remains unchanged there is a general rise in prices. This idea is not so readily understood as the rise in price when the demand for some one commodity increases. The demand for one commodity may increase because people buy more of it and less of other things. How can the general demand increase? All incomes are rewards for making a contribution to production, either by working, supplying capital, accepting the risks of industry, or hiring out land. Every penny received by firms producing goods is distributed in wages, rent, and interest, or retained as profits.

Probably no major Catholic writer has been the subject of more controversy among his co-religionists than Francis Mauriac. The generally acrid atmosphere of the novels, the darkly pessimistic view of human nature (‘Why must he write about such unpleasant people?’), the spiritual perturbation of the so-called ‘pre-conversion’ period—singly and conjointly these have inspired an abundance of searching debate concerning the validity of his Catholic position. Yet, it is almost certainly true that Mauriac is the most widely accepted among that gifted group of Catholic men of letters of this century who have gained for Catholicism in France a hearing and a respect unknown since the century of Bossuet. Consequently, it may be relevant to point out one aspect of Mauriac’s work in which his unquestionable Catholic orientation sets him sharply apart from the leading writers of fiction of his day.

If there is a single theme more than any other which has attracted the major novelists of the past third of a century it is that of man’s relation to time. Proust in France, Joyce in Ireland, Virginia Woolf in England, Thomas Mann in Germany, Faulkner in the United States, to name only the most eminent, have all been centrally concerned with the time problem. A contemporary critic has even suggested that Herman Melville anticipated these writers by half a century in the development of a metaphysic of time. But leaving Melville aside as representing the possible premonitory intuition of genius, the virtual simultaneity of impact of the time thesis in the works of the foremost practitioners of the contemporary novel in the western world is a striking phenomenon.