Two Lives

by Evelyn Waugh

Published 27 December 2001
Waugh wrote two biographies,both 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 A. Knox (1888-1957) was regarded as the most distinguished Anglican clerical convert to Catholicism since Newman. His literary output was huge, ranging from a monumental translation of the Vulgate to his much-admired crime novels that bear comparison with G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories. Waugh wrote an amusing and admiring biography of his famously witty friend.