The Path to Rome by Hilaire Belloc

The Path to Rome by Hilaire Belloc

Regular price
Checking stock...
Regular price
Checking stock...
The feel-good place to buy books
  • Free UK delivery over £5
  • 10% off preloved books when you join +Plus
  • Buying preloved emits 46% less CO2 than new
  • Give your books a new home - sell them back to us!

The Path to Rome by Hilaire Belloc

If you should ask how this book came to be written, it was in this way. One day as I was wandering over the world I came upon the valley where I was born, and stopping there a moment to speak with them all--when I had argued politics with the grocer, and played the great lord with the notary-public, and had all but made the carpenter a Christian by force of rhetoric--what should I note (after so many years) but the old tumble-down and gaping church, that I love more than mother-church herself, all scraped, white, rebuilt, noble, and new, as though it had been finished yesterday. Knowing very well that such a change had not come from the skinflint populace, but was the work of some just artist who knew how grand an ornament was this shrine (built there before our people stormed Jerusalem), I entered, and there saw that all within was as new, accurate, and excellent as the outer part; and this pleased me as much as though a fortune had been left to us all; for one's native place is the shell of one's soul, and one's church is the kernel of that nut.

Hilaire Belloc (1870- 1953) was born in La Celle-Saint-Cloud, France, and raised in England. Educated in Birmingham before voluntarily serving his military term of service in France, Belloc then returned to England to study History at Baliol College, Oxford where he graduated with a First class degree.

Writing on everything from poetry to war and travel in between, Belloc has been called one of the Big Four of Edwardian Letters, along with H.G.Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and G. K. Chesterton, all of whom debated each other into the 1930s. Belloc was closely associated with Chesterton, and Shaw coined the term Chesterbelloc for their partnership. A deeply religious Catholic, Belloc wrote considerably about his faith, and throughout his literary career he was concerned with the problems of social reform. He was a political activist and an MP for Salford from 1906 to 1910 for the Liberal party, and his written non-fiction work criticized both capitalism and aspects of socialism.

SKU Unavailable
ISBN 13 9781406547689
ISBN 10 1406547689
Title The Path to Rome
Author Hilaire Belloc
Condition Unavailable
Binding Type Paperback
Publisher Dodo Press
Year published 2007-06-29
Number of pages 260
Cover note Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.