Monsignor Ronald Knox (Monsignor Ronald Arbuthnott Knox) Biography

British writer, born at Kibworth, Leicestershire, educated at Balliol College, Oxford. At the age of 18 he enjoyed considerable success with Signa Severa (1906), a collection of epigrammatic light verses in English, Latin, and Greek. He entered the ministry in 1911 and became Chaplain of Trinity College, Oxford, in 1912. Absolute and Abitofhell (1913) is the most notable of his versified attacks on latitudinarianism. In 1917 he became a Roman Catholic, accounting for his conversion in the autobiographical A Spiritual Aeneid (1918). He was chaplain to the Roman Catholic undergraduates at Oxford from 1926 to 1939, when he resigned in order to concentrate on his translation of the Bible, which appeared in a single edition in 1955; The Trials of a Translator (1949) describes his preparations for this task. His other translations include the Autobiography of St Thérèse of Lisieux (1958). His other works include Enthusiasm (1950), a study of religious vagaries, and Let Dons Delight (1939), which traces the disintegration of a common culture through a sequence of imaginary conversations between Oxford dons from the sixteenth century onward. The Three Taps (1927) and Double Cross Purposes (1937) are among his numerous detective stories. His close friend Evelyn Waugh published The Life of the Right Reverend Ronald Knox in 1959.