One of Chesterton’s most frequently quoted jokes was his answer to the question, Which book would you most want to have on a desert island? He said, “Thomas’s Guide to Practical Ship-building” — and there was much of his personality in the remark: wit, of course, but also a rather obtrusively self-complimentary insistence on his own commonsensical attitude toward life.

Msgr. Ronald Knox (1888–1957)—the great man of letters and Catholic convert who became one of the leading apologists of the 20th century — was influenced by Chesterton in many ways, and his approach to the same question was likewise revealing. According to David Rooney’s impressive new guide to Knox’s works — The Wine of Certitude: A Literary Biography of Ronald Knox (Ignatius, 427 pp., $17.95) — the book Knox wanted on the desert island was . . . a Bradshaw railway schedule. The thick “ox-Bradshaw of to-day,” wrote Knox, was “that noble volume which all of us, if we thought the matter over with proper deliberation, would pack next to the Bible in our desert-island bookshelf. Nowhere else, assuredly, can Fancy roam so free; nothing else affords the same opportunity for solitary pastime.” Here, too, we have a window into the writer’s character: Knox was a whim- sical figure whose flights of fancy were nonetheless based on a very prosaic — even donnish — attention to specific facts. Rooney’s book is focused on Knox’s writings, as opposed to the details of his life; it’s therefore more valuable than Evelyn Waugh’s 1959 biography as an introduction to Knox’s lasting achievement. Rooney quotes generously from all genres in which Knox wrote (and excelled), among them apologetics, sermons, and detective stories; the reader has a good deal of help in compiling a personal Knox reading list. One of the book’s chapters addresses Knox’s most monumental under- taking — his translation of the Bible, which was published in 1944 (NT) and 1948–50 (OT). Rooney judges this work “most readable” and “successful [in] liberat[ing] the English Bible from encrusted archaisms.” Knox was, in fact, an admirable stylist, and his Bible is worth reading; it’s been out of print for a long time and Baronius Press is, fortunately, planning to publish a new edition soon. But I can endorse the second part of Rooney’s praise only with some reservations: In his Old Testament, Knox tends to add some deliberate archaisms of his own in his choice of word order. Here are a couple of examples chosen at random. I Chr. 17:5: “House was never mine, since I rescued the sons of Israel from Egypt.” (Compare KJV: “I have not dwelt in an house . . .”) And Is. 65:18: “Joy of yours, pride of yours, this new creation shall be.” (KJV: “But be ye glad and rejoice for ever in that which I create.”) It is, as Rooney points out, in the New Testament that Knox’s version really shines.