Compared with the early music compositions of child prodigies like Mozart or Camille Saint-Saëns; the novel Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor, was an impressive literary feat.

Today, hardly anybody reads "Uncle Toms Cabin", probably because the book has picked up a reputation as a cliché-ridden anti-slavery potboiler rather than as the moving story of faith and courage it truly is. Another reason for the neglect of "Uncle Toms Cabin" is that it is written with a profoundly Christian sensibility.

AS a retired professor of English who now and again returns to teaching, I am aware that the work I try to do with my students has less and less in common with what is going on in adjacent classrooms. I regret being out of step, but it is too late to break the habits of a lifetime, and in any case I cannot believe that they are bad habits.

Compared to some of the big names of Catholic fiction, e.g. Evelyn Waugh or Graham Greene; Sigrid Undset is almost unknown: which is a perplexing state of affairs given that she wrote some of the greatest fiction of the 20th Century.

In the course of his research for "Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile" Joseph Pearce traveled to Moscow to interview the Nobel Prize winning author. We are pleased to be able to publish this interview in an abridged form.

During an interview granted to Jubilee Magazine, Flannery O'Connor was reminded of something she had once written to the effect that the creative action of the Christian's life is to prepare his death in Christ. The interviewer then asked how this related to her work as a writer? O'Connor replied, "I'm a born Catholic and death has always been brother to my imagination. I can't imagine a story that doesn't properly end in it or in its foreshadowings."

Oscar Wilde is widely celebrated as an artist persecuted for his homosexuality, a sort of protomartyr for the cause of gay rights. The current celebration of Wilde as gay martyr is certainly one legitimate interpretation of his life, but it oversimplifies his complexity; indeed, it ignores the major movement of his life, a life that may also be seen as a long and difficult conversion to the Roman Catholic Church.

"The Two Towers", the second part of Peter Jackson's blockbuster film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, was let loose on an expectant nation on Dec. 18, 2002. Over the coming months and years it will be watched by millions of moviegoers throughout the world, most of whom will be unaware that they are watching a film version of what its author called "a fundamentally religious and Catholic work."

Thanks to the vision and persistence of Kiwi filmmaker Peter Jackson and the financial backing of Warner Brothers' New Line Cinema, these great stories are now becoming accessible to millions more around the world.

The other day, while I was meditating on morality and Mr. H. Pitt, I was, so to speak, snatched up and put into a jury box to try people. The snatching took some weeks, but to me it seemed something sudden and arbitrary. I was put into this box because I lived in Battersea, and my name began with a C.