Two Lives: Edmund Campion And Ronald Knox

Waugh wrote two biographies of very different English Roman Catholics. Edmund Campion (1540-1581) was a Jesuit priest who, in the turbulent years before the Spanish Armada, was charged with treason and executed. Waugh's book is an elegant homage to a man he revered as a hero and a martyr. Ronald Knox (1888-1957) was regarded as the most distinguished Anglican clerical convert to Catholicism since Newman. His literary output was huge, ranging from monumental translation of the Vulgate Bible to his much admired crime novels that bear comparison to the Father Brown stories by G.K. Chesterton. Waugh's biography is an amusing and admiring study of his famously witty friend.