Only two people have had the good fortune to have their biographies
written by Evelyn Waugh, and they were both Catholic priests. One was
Saint Edmund Campion, the sixteenth-century Jesuit. The other
was Ronald
Knox (1888–1957)—and who was he? Forty years after Knox’s death,
Waugh’s biography of 1959 is out of print, known
to few, and has had
only one substantial supplement, Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Knox
Brothers
(1977). Is there any case for a new biography, and what would such a
book add to its predecessors?

In 1945 Knox preached a sermon to commemorate the centenary of
the conversion of John Henry Newman (whose life overlapped with his by
two years). In the course of it, he said:

The kind of fame and of
opportunity which Newman had when he was an Anglican were of a more
enjoyable sort than the fame and opportunity he enjoyed when he was a
Catholic; and he must have foreseen it. To be part of a movement, of a
growing and a winning movement; to see, in all your personal contacts, in
all your literary projects, an opening for spreading the influence of that
movement; to dominate, in large part, by force of intellect the intellectual
world around you—I do not know that any kind of publicity can be so
sweet to a man’s vanity as the kind of publicity Newman had
before 1838.[1]

Or, he might have added, as the kind of publicity he enjoyed before
1917,