Two Lives: Knox and Campion

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 a 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.