He was born in Birmingham, England, and educated at Eton College and Balliol College, Oxford. In 1910, he became a fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, but left in 1917 when he was converted to Roman Catholicism. While a chaplain at the University of Oxford, he wrote and broadcast on Christianity and other subjects.
An essay in Knox's Essays in Satire (1928), "Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes", was the first of the genre of mock-serious critical writings on Sherlock Holmes and mock-historical studies in which the existence of Holmes, Watson, et al. is assumed. Oddly, the later works commonly go to much greater lengths to present a coherent case than did their model, which was meant only as a satire on certain trends in literary scholarship.
Autobiography