I’m reading an eBook version of Englishman Andrew Wilson’s After the Victorians: The Decline of Britain in the World. [1] Born in 1950, he is a significant British writer of his generation. That said, no one ever gets it all right. The name Geoffrey Bell comes up in Wilson’s account of the 1930s. I know his reputation as the English bishop whom Winston Churchill disliked and blocked from becoming archbishop of Canterbury. As a member of the House of Lords, Bell openly and loudly condemned the bombing of civilian population centers in Nazi Germany. I didn’t know until I read Wilson that Bell and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran pastor and theologian, who was executed on Hitler’s direct order, three weeks before Hitler shot himself, were friends.
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