Unusual in structure, ambitious in depth and breadth alike, this five person literary biography (Auden, Eliot, C.S. Lewis, Simone Weil, Jacques Maritain) showcases Jacobs’ scholarly brilliance. But it also presents the urgent, probing zeitgeist among Allied country’s Christian writers, poets, and public intellectuals as WWII begins to turn in their nations’ favor. Their engagement with the war’s  — and in particular, it’s new technologies’ —  lasting effects on hearts and minds, on education and the humanist tradition, in one crucible year, deserves contemplation today.