"I say the word " Anti-Semite" is vulgar and pedantic : that I think will be universally admitted. It is also nonsensical. The antagonism to the Jews… - Hilaire Belloc

The tender Evenlode that makes
Her meadows hush to hear the sound
Of waters mingling in the brakes,
And binds my heart to English ground. A lovely river, all alone,
She lingers in the hills and holds
A hundred little towns of stone,
Forgotten in the western wolds.

Life is a veil, its paths are dark and rough
Only because we do not know enough
When Science has discovered something more
We shall be happier than we were before.

Belloc led the charge in his critique of this misguided sense of superiority and myopic view of progress. But it was he alone among historians, social commentators, and counter-cultural voices who predicted that Islam — or as he called it, “Mohammedanism” — would rise again and, as it had in the past, harness the technology of the West as a weapon to turn back on the West and crush it by degrees. After September 11, 2001, no one is surprised to learn that Islam is turning the West’s superiority back on itself; what is surprising is that a lone historian and essayist saw this coming in the 1930s. That he captivates and places the reader in the middle of the action is an added bonus to the prophetic vision of what embroils our age.