Hilaire Belloc

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Hilaire Belloc (July 27, 1870 - July 16, 1953) was one of the most prolific writers in England during the early twentieth century. He was born near Paris to a French father and English mother and grew up in England. An 1895 graduate of Balliol College of Oxford University, Belloc wrote on myriad subjects, from warfare to poetry and many topics current in his day.

A strong personality with a forceful writing style, his best known works include The Servile State (1912), Europe and Faith (1920), and biographies of Oliver Cromwell, James II, and Napoleon. He was an ardent proponent of orthodox Catholicism and a critic of many elements of the modern world. In America, his writings in favor of distributism were popularized in The American Review, a periodical edited by Seward Collins in New York.

Belloc is nowadays best remembered for his "cautionary tales", humorous poems with a moral, such as Matilda, who told lies and was burnt to death.