Download First and Last by Hilaire Belloc. A 1911 general nonfiction work about essays, memory, travel, politics, literature, habit, friendship, social observation and Belloc's wide-ranging prose personality. Available in PDF, EPUB, MOBI and AZW3 formats.
About First and Last
First and Last by Hilaire Belloc is a 1911 general nonfiction work about essays, memory, travel, politics, literature, habit, friendship, social observation and Belloc's wide-ranging prose personality. Ideal for readers interested in Belloc's travel writing, history, Catholic thought, comic verse, essays and polemical public voice, it shows the range and energy of one of the most distinctive English prose stylists of the early twentieth century.
Genre: General Nonfiction
Why Read First and Last?
First and Last is worth reading because it shows Belloc's wide-ranging essay voice, moving between observation, anecdote, argument and comic reversal. He could turn apparently small subjects into reflections on politics, friendship, travel, memory, literature and the habits of modern life. First published in 1911, the work is concerned with essays, memory, travel, politics, literature, habit, friendship, social observation and Belloc's wide-ranging prose personality. Belloc's prose is vigorous, opinionated and recognisably personal, giving the reader the sense of a mind arguing, walking, laughing and judging at the same time.
Readers will value the book for the way Belloc combines clarity with personality. He is rarely a neutral guide. Whether he is writing about roads, children, battles, essays, Europe, faith or public life, he brings a strong viewpoint and a relish for memorable phrasing. That makes the work historically revealing as well as readable. It belongs to a world in which literary style, political conviction and moral judgement were often closely joined.
The title is also useful for understanding Belloc's range. He was not only a writer of children's comic verse, though that part of his work remains famous. He was also a historian, traveller, polemicist, essayist and religious controversialist. The same qualities often recur across these different forms: energy, confidence, humour, suspicion of modern abstraction and a love of concrete places, names, events and inherited traditions.
Modern readers may want to read First and Last critically, especially where Belloc's assumptions reflect the conflicts and loyalties of his age. Yet that critical distance does not reduce the work's value. It helps explain why Belloc remained such a distinctive public voice. For EBTA readers, this title adds to a varied Belloc collection by showing how forcefully he could connect subject matter with temperament: the book is not just about its topic, but about Belloc's way of seeing the world.
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