Immitigable.

I greatly enjoyed Michael Ledger-Lomas’s LRB review (23 July 2026; archived) of Converts: From Oscar Wilde to Muriel Spark, Why So Many Became Catholic in the 20th Century by Melanie McDonagh, but I have to give him a whack on the knuckles for the absurd statement at the end of this passage about Frederick Rolfe: Rolfe drifted to Venice, where he fraternised with gondoliers and male prostitutes before dying destitute in 1913, but not before he had produced another masterpiece, The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole. It obsessively yet exquisitely recounts Nicholas Crabbe’s martyrdom, which is also his own: Crabbe is yet another failed priest whose ‘ruthless immitigable faith’ both sustains him in and perpetuates his isolation and eventual death. ‘Immitigable’ – this and many other weird neologisms capture the perverse autodidacticism of Rolfe and his martyrs. Hadrian’s enemies in Rome had sniped at his ‘hendecasyllabical allocutions’. Why do people treat their own ignorance as eternal…