I am thrilled to find an issue of StAR devoted to Hilaire Belloc. From my boyhood I have been a devoted fan of his together with his alter ego GK Chesterton. But I have always regarded him as a no-holds-barred Catholic historian, with special emphasis on the Reformation and on the human beings associated with the Reformation. I have also seen him as a worthy successor to John Lingard. As a writer of travel, I have always regarded The Path to Rome as his masterpiece, and as a poet I have admired his Cautionary Tales for Children. But sadly these aspects of his genius have been largely neglected in this issue. Anyhow, the following points have been impressive for me, in order of pagination.

1. As usual, the editorial is a masterpiece of compression, by one who is no less pugnacious as a Catholic author than Belloc.

2 .I warmly applaud Belloc’s estimation of PG Wodehouse, except that my preference goes out rather to the doddering Earl of Emsworth than to Jeeves.

8. What on earth is this “principle of praegustatem”? I have never heard of any such principle, and the Latinity strikes me as odd. 10. Yes, “it isn’t always clear to us precisely what we do desire”. That reminds me of my small brother, when he used to say “I want!” without indicating what he did want.

16. Yes, the great Catholic doctrine, as reasserted by Pope Francis, is that “Creation is good” – or rather, as we read in Genesis, altogether “very good”.

18. I have never heard that Our Lady appeared to St Dominic with a revelation about the Rosary. It is even doubted whether the history of the Rosary goes back to St Dominic himself, and in any case the prayer Ave Maria wasn’t completed till the late Middle Ages.

19. “The intense, brooding Belloc” is an aspect of his character which I never noticed in my boyhood. He always seemed to me so breezy, so outward-going, such an extrovert.

20. The words of Grizzlebeard, “It will not end as you choose”, remind me of the similar words of TS Eliot in “Little Gidding”, if in a somewhat different context.

28. How true, that “There is and can be no spontaneous action by the populace”! People have to be moved, for good or for ill, from outside. So much in today’s politics depends on “lobbying” and demonstrations by a few people in front of TV cameras. 30. The ideas presented here on “Catholic moral philosophy” need some trimming in view of Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato’si.

34. It is good to be reminded of Chesterton’s definition of tradition as “the democracy of the dead”.

34. Many thanks for these memorable words of Handel concerning his Messiah. That is exactly what I feel whenever I attend the performance of the oratorio from year to year. Similarly in his “Il Penseroso” Milton speaks of how the pealing organ and the full-voiced choir “dissolve me into ecstasies, and bring all heaven before mine eyes”.