I WAS SORRY I was unable to be present at the recent Mass in St Peter and Paul's, High Road, Ilford, when the Ursuline High School or Morland Road, Ilford, Essex, celebrated 450 years of the Ursuline Order.
The Order, founded in Italy in 1535, has six schools in England. Over 600 pupils, staff, parents and friends attended the Mass which was celebrated by Mgr Michael Corley.
We wish the Ursulines many more centuries of fruitful Christian education! THIS IS the
of
cover attraceve bookseller Aidan Mackey's current catalogue of books and pamphlets by G K Chesterton. Aldan, who welcomes visitors by appointment at 15 Shaftesbury Avenue, Bedford (telephone 0234-57760) has an enormous range of books by Chesterton and by Belloc in his catalogues, and he tells me that both authors, but Chesterton particularly, are being read more widely in this country than at any time since they died, and the word 'boom' describes the demand in Japan, USA, Canada and Australia. Telephone orders from those countries have grown in frequency over the past few years.
A publisher in San Francisco is actively engaged on producing a complete works of Chesterton, to run to over 30 volumes.
Professor Kazumi Yamagata of Tsukuba University, Tokyo, has recently returned there after spending a year in this country researching a major new biography of GKC for the Japanese market.
There have been Iwo important studies of him published recently in France, and works on both Belloc and Chesterton from the US are too numerous to list.
A couple of days ago he had a letter from Norway, from someone who is to publish all of Chesterton's literary studies,
religious works and novels,
starting later this year. In this
country A N Wilson has written
the most important study of Belloc since Robert Speaight's `official' biography of 1957, and Dr John Coates, of the University of Hull has published a valuable study of Chesterton.
The Australian Broadcasting Co has recently produced a magnificent hour-long radio programme on Distributism, and have done a dramatisation of The Man Who was Thursday. They have a long programme on Belloc's Path to Rome in preparation, and other programmes on them are expected.
Aidan started to read Chesterton and Belloc at the age of 14, and has never stopped. About nine years ago he took an early retirement from teaching and started as a second-handbook seller with a general stock, but specialising in Belloc, Chesterton, C S Lewis, Dorothy L Sayers and Charles Williams.
He acts as a sort of information centre on them, and is Chairman of the Chesterton Society.
Each year, From Easter to the end of September, he joins with a friend to run a bookshop in Walsingham, where there is a great deal of interest in this group of Catholic and Anglican writers, and in standard, scholarly theology.