H Belloc – författare

This antiquarian book comprises a collection of forty-one essays written by the famous Anglo-French writer and historian, Hilaire Belloc. Full of Belloc''s hallmark Dickensian wit, this collection of interesting and insightful essays will appeal to fans and collectors of his work, and would make for a worthy addition to any bookshelf. The essays of this compendium include: "On Weighing Anchor", "The Reveillon", "On Cheeses", "The Captain of Industry", "The Inventor", "The Views of England", "The Lunatic", "The Inheritance of Humour", "The Old Gentleman''s Opinions", "On Historical Evidence", "The Absence of the Past", etcetera. Joseph Hilaire Pierre René Belloc (1870 - 1953) was one of the most prolific writers in England in the early-twentieth century. His famous works include: "The Liberal Tradition" (1897), "The Young Napoleon" (1905), and "Contemporary France" (1906). We are republishing this vintage work now in an affordable, modern edition, complete with a specially commissioned new biography of the author.

Welcome to the book series 7 best short stories specials, selection dedicated to a special subject, featuring works by noteworthy authors. The texts were chosen based on their relevance, renown and interest.This edition is dedicated to walking. A common activity for man, walking can be a form of physical exercise, spiritual practice and philosophical tool. Being so universal, the habit of walking has certainly been addressed many times by literature - in this volume you will find seven examples of this relationship between literature and walking.This book contains the following texts: Walking, and the wild by Henry David Thoreau; Walking Tours by Robert Louis Stevenson; Walking an Antidote to City Poison by Sydney Smith; A Stout Pedestrian by Walter Scott; Lake Scenery by William Wordsworth; The Exhilarations of the Road by John Burroughs; Is Walking Selfish? by Arnold Haultain. If you appreciate good literature, be sure to check out the other Tacet Books titles!

You will, I know, permit me to address you these essays which are more the product of your erudition than of my enthusiasm.With the motives of their appearance you are familiar.We have wondered together that a society so avid of experience and enlargement as is ours, should ignore the chief expression of its closest neighbour, its highest rival and its coheir in Europe: should ignore, I mean, the literature of the French.We have laughed together, not without despair, to see the mind of England, for all its majesty and breadth, informed at the most critical moments in the policy of France by such residents of Paris as were at the best fanatical, at the worst (and most ordinary) corrupt.Seeing around us here a philosophy and method drawn from northern Germany, a true and subtle sympathy with the Italians, and a perpetual, just and accurate comment upon the minor nationalities of Europe, a mass of recorded travel superior by far to that of other countries, we marvelled that France in particular should have remained unknown.We were willing, in an earlier youth, to read this riddle in somewhat crude solutions. I think we have each of us arrived, and in a final manner, at the sounder conclusion that historical accident is principally to blame. The chance concurrence of this defeat with that dynastic influence, the slip by which the common sense of political simplicity missed footing in England and fell a generation behind, the marvellous industrial activities of this country, protected by a tradition of political discipline which will remain unique in History; the contemporaneous settling down of France into the equilibrium of power--an equilibrium not established without five hearty civil wars and perhaps a hundred campaigns--all these so separated the two worlds of thought as to leave France excusable for her blindness towards the destinies and nature of England, and England excusable for her continued emptiness of knowledge upon the energy and genius of France: though these were increasing daily, immensely, at our very side.

The fifteenth century, the storm of the Renaissance, are not taught. Why, Rabelais himself might be but an unfamiliar name had not a northern squire of genius rendered to the life three quarters of his work. The list is interminable. Even the great Drama of the great century is but a text for our schools leaving no sort of trace upon the mind: and as for the French moderns (I have heard it from men of liberal education) they are denied to have written any poetry at all: so exact, so subtle, so readily to be missed, are the proportions of their speech. If you ask me why I should myself approach the matter, I can plead some inheritance of French blood, com-parable, I believe, to your own; and though I have no sort of claim to that unique and accomplished scholar-ship which gives you a mastery of the French tongue unmatched in England, and a complete familiarity with its history, application and genius, yet I can put to my credit a year of active, if eccentric, experience in a French barrack room, and a complete segregation during those twelve memorable months wherein I could study the very soul of this sincere, creative, and tenacious people.