MARLPIT PRESSIndependent PublisherThese notes grow directly from the books Marlpit publishes. They focus on questions that a short retailer description cannot answer: what changed between editions, how a text fits into a larger tradition, what contemporary readers thought, and where the historical record is uncertain.
Edward Gordon Selwyn and Liberal Anglo-Catholicism
How Selwyn joined Catholic doctrine, sacramental Anglicanism, historical criticism, and intellectual freedom in the interwar Church of England.
Read research noteSupernatural Christianity and Historical Criticism
The central problem of The Approach to Christianity: whether modern criticism and psychology can be accepted without reducing Christianity to naturalism.
Read research noteSelwyn on the Resurrection and Historical Criticism
Why the Resurrection became a decisive test of Selwyn’s attempt to defend objective supernatural faith while taking modern biblical criticism seriously.
Read research noteSelwyn, Friedrich von Hügel, and Religious Experience
How von Hügel helped shape Selwyn’s treatment of religious experience, psychology, tradition, and the supernatural.
Read research noteHow The Approach to Christianity Was Received in 1926
A guide to the early review trail in The Journal of Theological Studies, The Churchman, and the London Quarterly Review.
Read research noteGeorge Salmon’s Private Judgment Argument Against Infallibility
Why submission to an infallible Church still requires judgments about which Church, which authority, and which acts are infallible.
Read research noteGeorge Salmon on Vatican I and Papal Infallibility
How Salmon tests the apologetic promise of an infallible guide against Pastor Aeternus, Gallicanism, ultramontanism, and the practical recognition of ex cathedra teaching.
Read research noteGeorge Salmon, Pope Honorius, and Papal Infallibility
Why Honorius became one of Salmon’s most important historical stress tests, and how Catholic replies distinguish the case from an ex cathedra definition.
Read research noteGeorge Salmon on Newman and Doctrinal Development
Salmon’s challenge to theories of doctrinal development: what evidence could count against a claimed development, and how are development and corruption distinguished?
Read research noteHow Catholics Answered George Salmon
From Jeremiah Murphy and the Catholic Encyclopedia to B. C. Butler’s 1954 book-length reply, Salmon remained a serious target in Catholic apologetics.
Read research noteC. D. Broad’s Mathematical Archangel and the Knowledge Argument
How Broad’s 1925 thought experiment anticipated later arguments that complete physical knowledge may fail to reveal what experience is like.
Read research noteWhat Is C. D. Broad’s Emergent Materialism?
Broad’s precise theory of emergence, why it differs from simple reduction, and the qualification needed to state his final position accurately.
Read research noteC. D. Broad’s Seventeen Theories of Mind and Matter
Why Broad refused the simple materialism-dualism-idealism trilemma and mapped seventeen possible relations between mind and matter.
Read research noteWhy C. D. Broad Took Psychical Research Seriously
How survival, telepathy, clairvoyance, fraud, and other hypotheses became evidence in Broad’s larger philosophy of mind.
Read research noteHow The Mind and Its Place in Nature Was Received
Bertrand Russell, the Times Literary Supplement, L. Susan Stebbing, and the unusually broad reception of Broad’s 1925 book.
Read research noteWhy A. E. J. Rawlinson Wrote Religious Reality
How military-hospital Confirmation work during the First World War produced a compact Christian book for adult men.
Read research noteHow Reviewers Received Religious Reality in 1918–1919
What The Expository Times and International Journal of Ethics actually praised, questioned, and found unusual.
Read research noteA. E. J. Rawlinson and Liberal Catholic Anglicanism
How Rawlinson combined sacramental Catholic Christianity, historical criticism, intellectual freedom, and a strong doctrine of the Church.
Read research noteReligious Reality on War, Labour, Politics, and Work
Why Rawlinson thought Christianity had to judge economic life, nationalism, labour relations, citizenship, and war.
Read research noteWhat Does “A Book for Men” Mean in Religious Reality?
Why Rawlinson addressed male readers directly about work, politics, military service, sex, marriage, discipline, worship, and responsibility.
Read research noteThe Royal Road to Romance — Review & Historical Value
Why Halliburton’s 1925 bestseller still works, where its early-twentieth-century assumptions show, and how to read it a century later.
Read research noteWhere Richard Halliburton Goes in The Royal Road to Romance
A precise guide to the 1921–23 journey: Matterhorn, Gibraltar, Egypt, India, the Himalayas, Angkor, China, and Mount Fuji.
Read research noteHow Reviewers Received The Royal Road to Romance in 1925
The book’s earliest critics saw exactly what readers loved: youth, speed, danger, emotional intoxication, charm, and the infectious fantasy of escape.
Read research noteHow Richard Halliburton Invented the Celebrity Travel Writer
Books, lectures, photographs, newspaper stunts, and personality-driven adventure made Halliburton feel surprisingly modern.
Read research noteRoosevelt: His Mind in Action — Review & Historical Value
Why Lewis Einstein’s 1930 psychological portrait of Theodore Roosevelt still matters, where it remains sharp, and where its interwar assumptions show.
Read research noteLewis Einstein, Theodore Roosevelt, and Algeciras
How Einstein’s first-hand role at the 1906 Algeciras Conference shaped his understanding of Roosevelt’s secrecy, restraint, and diplomatic power.
Read research noteTheodore Roosevelt as Author of His Own Legend
Einstein’s strikingly modern argument that Roosevelt did not merely make history; he also worked consciously to shape how posterity would remember it.
Read research noteHow Reviewers Received Roosevelt: His Mind in Action
From Foster Rhea Dulles and the TLS to Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the 1930–31 reception reveals what readers found powerful and questionable in Einstein’s method.
Read research noteHow Accurate Is Katharine Anthony’s Queen Elizabeth?
What Anthony gets right about personality and female sovereignty, where her 1929 psychological method overreaches, and why her religious history needs caution.
Read research noteKatharine Anthony and the New Biography
How a feminist social researcher became a psychological biographer, and where Queen Elizabeth fits beside Strachey and the interwar revolution in life-writing.
Read research noteHow Reviewers Received Queen Elizabeth in 1929
The New Yorker admired the intimate portrait, The Spectator was divided, and a professional historian attacked the book’s method and documentation.
Read research noteWhy Christian Homeschoolers Read Theras and His Town
Why Snedeker’s ancient-Greece adventure still appears in Sonlight and Veritas Press, and how its Christian framing works.
Read research noteTheras and His Town: Reading Level & Curriculum Use
A practical guide to read-aloud use, independent reading, historical grade placement, Sonlight, Veritas Press, and pairing the novel with ancient history.
Read research noteAthens vs. Sparta in Theras and His Town
How Snedeker turns two rival Greek societies into a memorable argument about education, freedom, discipline, beauty, courage, and belonging.
Read research noteWhy Catholic Homeschoolers Read The Boy Knight of Reims
Why a 1927 novel about Reims Cathedral, artistic apprenticeship, Joan of Arc, and vocation remains assigned in Catholic curricula.
Read research noteWho Was Jean d’Orbais?
The real thirteenth-century architect of Reims Cathedral, Lownsbery’s fictional fifteenth-century descendant, and why the distinction matters.
Read research noteEloise Lownsbery, Nicholas Roerich, and the 'New Knights'
The Roerich epigraph, Lownsbery’s later teaching of 'Art applied to Ethics,' and the strongest evidence for what the novel was trying to do.
Read research noteIs A Farewell to Arms Autobiographical?
What Ernest Hemingway took from his 1918 wound and Agnes von Kurowsky, what came from later life, and what he invented for Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley.
Read research noteDid Hemingway Witness the Retreat from Caporetto?
Hemingway did not witness Caporetto. How he researched the Italian retreat of 1917 and turned an event he never saw into the novel’s great military sequence.
Read research noteHow Many Endings Did Hemingway Write for A Farewell to Arms?
Hemingway said thirty-nine endings. The surviving archive contains forty-four handwritten ending drafts, while later exhibitions and editions count about forty-seven variants.
Read research noteThe 1909 and 1922 Editions of Otto Rank’s Hero Myth
What changed between Otto Rank's 1909 and substantially expanded 1922 editions of The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, and why the difference matters.
Read research noteAlfred Nutt Before Otto Rank: The Prehistory of the Hero Pattern
How Alfred Nutt's 1881 expulsion-and-return study and Johann Georg von Hahn's earlier formula anticipate the hero pattern later associated with Otto Rank.
Read research noteWhere Xiyou bu Fits Into Journey to the West
Where the 1641 Xiyou bu fits into Journey to the West, why it begins after the Mountain of Fire, and how its Qing Fish dream transforms Sun Wukong's pilgrimage.
Read research noteAnthony Berkeley and the “Puzzle of Character”
Why Anthony Berkeley called The Second Shot an experiment in the puzzle of character and how it points from the Golden Age whodunit toward Francis Iles.
Read research noteThe White Crow in 1928: Philip MacDonald Between Puzzle and Thriller
The publication, reception, and later disappearance of Philip MacDonald's 1928 Anthony Gethryn mystery The White Crow.
Read research noteHow Liddell Hart Turned Sherman Into a Strategic Argument
Why B. H. Liddell Hart chose William Tecumseh Sherman, how the 1929 biography shaped his indirect approach, and why later historians read the book critically.
Read research noteWhat William Bolitho Meant by “Adventure”
Why Twelve Against the Gods includes figures from Casanova to Woodrow Wilson and what William Bolitho meant by the dangerous psychology of the adventurer.
Read research noteWho Is Who in W. H. Mallock’s The New Republic?
A guide to the Victorian intellectuals behind W. H. Mallock's 1877 roman à clef The New Republic, including Pater, Arnold, Ruskin, Jowett, and scientific naturalists.
Read research noteHow Much of The Story of San Michele Is Autobiography?
How to read Axel Munthe's The Story of San Michele as memoir, literary reconstruction, medical anecdote, fantasy, and self-mythology.
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