Michael Seymour Gerveys Sewell (30 July 1912 – 2 April 2000), usually now known by his religious name Brocard Sewell, was a British Carmelite friar and literary figure. Biography He was born in Bangkok, and brought up in Cornwall, England. Educated at Weymouth College (leaving at 16), he became a Catholic convert in 1931. As a young man he was involved with H. D. C. Pepler in craft printing, before testing his vocation first of all with the Dominicans, whom he left shortly before joining the Royal Air Force during World War Two. Returning after the war to religious life, he was professed first of all with the Austin Canons before becoming a Carmelite friar in 1952 (and being ordained priest in 1954), remaining with the Carmelites for the rest of his life. In a subsequent career as editor, publisher, printer and writer, he commemorated and wrote up a number of lesser literary lights: Arthur Machen, Frederick Rolfe, Montague Summers, Marc-André Raffalovich, John Gray, Olive Custance, Henry Williamson. He also wrote on distributist figures and on Eric Gill and The Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic. Using the Aylesford Review – the magazine of the monastery in which he was cloistered – he also publicised the works of some of the 1960s counterculture poets, in particular Michael Horovitz and his erstwhile wife Frances Horovitz who with others made many trips to Aylesford Priory during the 1960s and 1970s. Sewell, who enjoyed a close friendship with Frances Horovitz, became her confessor and confidant (the fact that she was not Roman Catholic did not prevent Sewell hearing her confession) and following her death of cancer in 1983, he became her biographer. As noted by Oswald Mosley biographer Stephen Dorril, Sewell was himself a member of the Distributist League and the British Union of Fascists, and also befriended both Henry Williamson and Mosley himself. Later, during the 1960s, he engaged in a high-profile controversy, speaking out against the Catholic Church's teachings on contraception, but seems in many other ways to have been critical of the modernising of the Roman Catholic Church following Vatican II particularly with regard to the use of the vernacular in the Mass. Yet in other ways Sewell seems to have been curiously non-condemnatory in his evaluations of people and could also be extremely detached in assessing the contributions of those of other points of view or lifestyle, not