A tribute to Msgr. Ronald Knox

Mary of Holyrood may smile indeed,
   Knowing what grim historic shade it shocks
To see wit, laughter and the Popish creed,
   Cluster and sparkle in the name of Knox

"Namesake" (1925)

[found in The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton. Volume X: Collected Poetry, Part I]

Yes; it is true that to-day, for the first time, our newspapers and our new politicians have asked us to forget, not what happened a thousand years ago or a hundred years ago, but what happened twenty years ago. When it is a question of shifting a policy or rehabilitating a politician, they will ask us to forget what happened two years ago or two months ago. Here, indeed, we have the great Spengler System, of total separation of one historical episode from another. Here is the true trick of regarding ourselves as divided by aeons and abysses not only from our fathers, but from ourselves. Thus, by reading the daily paper every day, and forgetting everything that it said on the previous day, we can divide human history into self-contained cycles; each consisting, not of five hundred years, but of twenty-four hours. By this means we can consider the slogans and swaggering policies which we ourselves cheered only recently, as if they were hieroglyphics as unintelligible as the Cup and Ring of Stones."

-September 3, 1932, Illustrated London News

 (H/T to the G.K. Chesterton Facebook page )

"I left school at the age of 14, went into engineering drawing and from there by a succession of logical steps into the cinema. I was reading Buchan and Chesterton then (even as a child I never cared much for Sexton Blake and the lower orders), and all the real-life crime stories I could get a hold of, but it never occured to me as a practical possibility that my professional life might take that turn."

-Alfred Hitchcock

(Source: Hitchcock on Hitchcock, Volume 1: Selected Writings and Interviews, p. 60)