Adventures in the Book Pages: Essays and Reviews
Published by Gracewing Publishing | September, 2015 | 464 Pages | $35.00 Purchase
Book Précis
In Adventures in the Book Pages, Edward Short shares his insights into history, literature, music, art, religion, and biography from a refreshingly Catholic standpoint. Here are essays and reviews on Renaissance portraiture, Catholic poetry, the Great War, Europe entre deux guerres, and the Blue Plaques of London. There are also pieces on Ben Jonson, Samuel Johnson, W. M. Thackeray, Gerard Manley Hopkins, G. K. Chesterton, T. S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and Penelope Fitzgerald, as well as Henry V, Henry VIII, John Ruskin, A. W. N. Pugin, Henry Mayhew, Edward VII, Henry Irving, Ellen Terry, Winston Churchill, Kenneth Clark, Alec Guinness, John Osborne, Charles Arnold-Baker and the Queen Mother. And, last, but not least, an extended essay on Cardinal Newman and the idea of sanctity.
Reviews for Adventures in the Book Pages
Photographer unknown. Winston Churchill. 1900. Photograph. Imperial War Museum, London.
"Adventures in the Book Pages is a romp and a marvel. I can't decide which is its most winning attribute, erudition, range or elegance of expression. So let's call it a photo finish." James Grant, author of Bagehot: The Life and Times of the Greatest Victorian (2019)
Edward Short's Adventures in the Book Pages is "a fine collection", "witty," "wise," and "entertaining." The Catholic Herald (lead review in print edition)
"Edward Short "shows that the old-fashioned phrase, 'a man of letters', still has relevance. Well-read, cultured, with an ear for writing good prose as well as discerning it in others," the author provides "thoughtful and perceptive comments on G.M. Hopkins and Eliot, Waugh and Graham Greene, GK Chesterton, Penelope Fitzgerald, Auden, Cardinal Newman, the historian Michael Burleigh, and artists such as Leonardo and Edward Burne-Jones. . . . A treat to browse." Francis Phillips, The Catholic Herald. Full review found here.
"If you have never encountered author, reviewer and essayist Edward Short, you are in for a real adventure in the pages of this book; and if you know his work already, you know what to expect from this erudite, articulate writer of both catholic and Catholic interests. . . . This compendium brings together reviews and essays written over many years on a comprehensive range of writers (many of them Catholic), politicians, actors, painters, historical figures, and so on. His themes are wide-ranging. . . . His tone is always judicious . . . his style eminently readable." Richard Ormrod, Faith Magazine
Reynolds, Joshua. Samuel Johnson. 1770. Painting. National Portrait Gallery, London.
"Edward Short is . . . a gentleman scholar, enjoyably opinionated, engagingly well-informed, and, flatteringly, he expects his readers to have similar qualities. Having enjoyed his studies of Cardinal Newman, I began Adventures in the Book Pages hoping to find further dispatches from the political, cultural, and religious life of the nineteenth century. I got that and a whole lot more. . . . With essays on Pugin, Dr Johnson, Hopkins, Thackeray, Gladstone, T.S. Eliot and Graham Greene, the volume is thoroughly catholic. . . . I was duly beguiled." James McGlone, The Chesterton Review