Modern Age - Spring 2016 - 155

WHO'S AFRAID OF ARTHUR BRYANT?

Oxfordshire and New South Wales), the long since terminated
magazine Illustrated London News-Brit diaspora culture's golden
thread-brought within its covers an essay by Bryant.
Born in 1899, Bryant had been writing those essays in that periodical from 1936, when he took over as the ILN's chief columnist
from Chesterton; and he continued turning them out until his own
death in 1985. (Chesterton he cherished, despite conspicuous
religious differences between Chesterton the eventual Catholic
and Bryant the lifelong Protestant. Introducing a posthumously
published [1955] collection of GKC's articles, Bryant opined: "If any
literary name of our age becomes a legend transcending letters,
it will, I believe, be [Chesterton's]. . . . I never met a more generous
man, and I never saw a happier." He also called Belloc, in 1940,
"the most versatile of all living prose writers. Now that Hardy,
Kipling, Galsworthy, and Chesterton are dead, he is undoubtedly
one of the three or four greatest.")
Very well, this could be interesting, but even 1985 was a generation back, and has Bryant anything worthwhile for audiences in
2016? Never mind who's afraid of Arthur Bryant; who cares about
Arthur Bryant? Should we?

A

nswers to these questions lie in a deeply impressive English
survey, itself a decade old, by Dr. Julia Stapleton, from the
University of Durham. Sir Arthur Bryant and National History in
Twentieth-Century Britain (2006) is not a conventional biography
or, indeed, a biography of any sort. For instance, we learn from
it almost nothing about Bryant's two marriages, or the motives
that persuaded the octogenarian to plan a third marriage only
months before he perished. What Dr. Stapleton does, with unfailing rectitude, is map the contours of Bryant's creative mind: one
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Modern Age - Spring 2016

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