Hilaire Belloc

Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) was born near Paris to a French father and an English mother, served in the French artillery and became a British subject in 1902. He sat as a Liberal member of Parliament from 1906 to 1910 and spent the rest of his life writing: comic verse in Cautionary Tales for Children, the walking book The Path to Rome, polemical history, the political tract The Servile State, and the sailing memoir The Cruise of the Nona. A combative Catholic and the close friend of G. K. Chesterton, he was so often paired with him that Shaw coined the name Chesterbelloc for the two of them.