In 1947, when Ronald Knox moved in to the Manor House at Mells to stay, it seemed as if St Jerome had taken up residence. “All that is needed,” wrote Daphne Pollen, a frequent visitor, “is a lion.”
For Ronald Knox had just completed his single-handed translation of the Bible, in idiomatic if poised English. His character, given to melancholy, had considerably less asperity than St Jerome’s. He was hypersensitive to causing trouble. “When would K least hate for me to arrive?” he asked of the head of his new household.
This was Katharine Asquith, the widow of the prime minister’s son Raymond, killed in the Great War. To her had come Mells, a medieval house set off by a lovely 16th-century church and ancient Somerset village. She had with some sacrifice embraced Catholicism, struck by the way faith had sustained her friend Hilaire Belloc after his wife’s death.
Read it all from the Telegraph (regiistration or subscription required).
Christopher Howse-Sacred Mysteries: Ronald Knox (1888-1957) scholar, wit and melancholiac
In 1947, when Ronald Knox moved in to the Manor House at Mells to stay, it seemed as if St Jerome had taken up residence. “All that is needed,” wrote Daphne Pollen, a frequent visitor, “is a lion.”
For Ronald Knox had just completed his single-handed translation of the Bible, in idiomatic if poised English. His character, given to melancholy, had considerably less asperity than St Jerome’s. He was hypersensitive to causing trouble. “When would K least hate for me to arrive?” he asked of the head of his new household.
This was Katharine Asquith, the widow of the prime minister’s son Raymond, killed in the Great War. To her had come Mells, a medieval house set off by a lovely 16th-century church and ancient Somerset village. She had with some sacrifice embraced Catholicism, struck by the way faith had sustained her friend Hilaire Belloc after his wife’s death.
Read it all from the Telegraph (regiistration or subscription required).