Hollis was born at
Wells,
Somerset, in 1902, one of the four sons of
George Arthur Hollis (1868–1944), vice-principal of the
Wells Theological College and later
Bishop of Taunton. He was educated at
Eton and
Balliol College, Oxford, where he was president of the
Oxford Union Society and a member of the
Hypocrites' Club. He travelled as a member of the Union's debating team to the
United States,
New Zealand and
Australia. At Oxford he met his lifelong friend
Douglas Woodruff. He was a friend of
Ronald Knox and
Evelyn Waugh and in 1924 converted to
Roman Catholicism, as Knox had already done and as Waugh did later. For ten years from 1925 he taught history at
Stonyhurst College, then from 1935 to 1939 was a visiting professor of the
University of Notre Dame,
Indiana, where he carried out economic research. At the beginning of the
Second World War, Hollis returned home and served throughout the war as a
Royal Air Force intelligence officer. Immediately after the war, he was elected as
Member of Parliament for
Devizes in
Wiltshire and held the seat until he retired undefeated in 1955. While in the House of Commons, he showed an independent spirit, for example by supporting the abolition of
capital punishment while that was not his party's general view, and was popular on all sides. When he left the Commons (to be succeeded by another Conservative,
Percivall Pott) he became a parliamentary commentator for
Punch and retired to
Mells, near
Frome in Somerset, where he spent his time in writing books and journalism and in supporting
Somerset County Cricket Club and other local interests. He was also a member of the publishing firm Hollis and Carter, a subsidiary of Burns and Oates. In 1957, he briefly revisited Australia, in association with the
Congress for Cultural Freedom. Hollis wrote books and articles on a variety of historical and political subjects. His last book,
Oxford in the Twenties (1976) is about his wide circle of friends, including Evelyn Waugh,
Maurice Bowra,
Harold Acton,
Leslie Hore-Belisha, and the cricketer
R. C. Robertson-Glasgow. ==Family==