Hilaire Belloc was born in the middle of a thunderstorm, and it is hard for anyone writing about him now to resist observing how apt was this scene, since thunderclouds of controversy, often of his own seeking, seemed to surround him for much of his life. An impassioned controversialist and a brilliant talker, Belloc enjoyed espousing unpopular opinions and telling the British public, especially the intellectuals, about the folly and ignorance of their cherished views. However erratic his own views were--and some of them were very erratic indeed--Belloc delivered them, in person or in print, with such eloquence and fluent wit that people were usually eager to hear him out. Belloc's characteristic wit, while still recognizable in some of his polemical and descriptive prose, has survived for our time nowhere so well as in his light verse for children. The Bad Child's Book of Beasts (1896) and Cautionary Tales...