With access to previously unpublished material in the form of Hilaire Belloc's letters and photographs, Pearce's major new biography uncovers a romantic, complex, and solitary character. Illustrations.

A striking portrait of Charles I, this book also looks closely at the role that the burgeoning financial powers played in shaping European politics and the effects that these powers had on the English monarchy during his reign. Belloc also explores the consequences of these effects for Europe generally. At the same time, it is a detailed study of the man who was Charles I with all his strengths, all his weaknesses. Belloc’s sense of history sheds light on how those strengths and weaknesses contributed to action or inaction by Charles and how those actions affected England and the rest of Europe.

Hilaire Belloc's landmark study Characters of the Reformation argues that Western Europe's break from the Catholic Church was driven by a land-grab and looting of Church property by European noblemen. Belloc has little admiration for the so-called leaders of the time and credits the Reformation to behind-the-scenes players. Each chapter is a mini-biography and individuals covered include Anne Boleyn, Pope Clement the Seventh, Cecil, Richelieu, Laud, Oliver Cromwell, Descartes, Pascal and more.

This book lays out, in very broad outline, Belloc's version of European economic history, starting with ancient pagan states, in which slavery was critical to the economy, through the medieval Christendom process which transformed an economy based on serf labour in a state in which the property was well distributed, to 19th and 20th century capitalism. Belloc argues that the development of capitalism was not a natural consequence of the Industrial Revolution, but a consequence of the earlier dissolution of the monasteries in England, which then shaped the course of English industrialisation. English capitalism then spread across the world.

"[...] Spain, not devout at all, but hating things not Catholic because those things are foreign, was more than apart. Britain had long forgotten the unity of Europe. France, a protagonist, was notoriously divided within herself over the religious principle of that unity. No modern religious analysis such as men draw up who think of religion as Opinion will make anything of all this. Then why was there a fight? People who talk of "Democracy" as the issue of the Great War may be neglected: Democracy-one noble, ideal, but rare and perilous, form of human government-was not at stake. No historian can talk thus. The essentially aristocratic policy of England now turned to a plutocracy, the despotism of Russia and [...]."

In this new edition of a classic work, the great Catholic apologist and historian Hilaire Belloc examines the five most destructive heretical movements in Christianity: Arianism, Mohammedanism (Islam), Albigensianism, Protestantism, and Modernism. Belloc describes how these movements began, how they spread, and how they have continued to influence the world. He accurately predicts the re-emergence of militant Islam and its violent aggression against Western civilization. When we hear the word "heresies", we tend to think of distant centuries filled with religious quarrels that seemed important at the time but are no longer relevant. Belloc shows that the heresies of olden times are still with us, sometimes under different names and guises, and that they still shape our world.