To me the art of the Counter Reformation was a pure joy and I loved the churches of Bernini and Borromini no less than the ancient basilicas. And this in turn led me to the literature of the Counter Reformation, and I came to know St Theresa and St John of the Cross, compared to whom even the greatest of non-Catholic religious writers seem pale and unreal.19.

The war against the dragon is not, therefore, a war against a physical monster, like a dinosaur, but a battle against the wickedness we encounter in our everyday lives. We all face our daily dragons and we must all defend ourselves from them and hopefully slay them. The sobering reality is that we must either fight the dragons that we encounter in life or become dragons ourselves. There is no “comfortable” alternative.

To go to seances with good intentions is like holding a smoking concert in a powder-magazine on behalf of an orphan asylum.’4.

When Belloc said that the Protestant Reformation was the shipwreck of Christendom, he was simply stating a historical fact, but it was controversial because history is political.

In the absence of virtue and wisdom, intelligence becomes a servant of evil.

And here is the paradox at the heart of the Christian life: The one who embraces suffering, who dies to himself in order to die for others, is actually happier than the one who shuns suffering and who puts himself above all else.

He could not write what he wanted, but what he had to.

Non-ambiguity is the shaping force of reality.

Love is the greatest preacher and the greatest teacher.

The dragon sickness is a euphemism for the bourgeois materialism which is rife in our consumerist culture. Smaug’s fury at the loss of a single insignificant and practically useless trinket serves as a metaphor for modern man and his mania for possessing trash that he doesn’t need.