Showing results by author "G.K Chesterton" in All Categories

With his black hat, huge umbrella, unworldly simplicity and 'beaming but breathless geniality', Father Brown is one of fiction's best-loved amateur detectives. Short and tatty, but with the wisdom and insight to unravel the most wayward of criminal minds, he has entertained generations. In this collection of 13 full-cast dramatisations, the high priest of detection becomes involved in seven intriguing cases that will tax even his mental powers to the limit.

A collection of thrilling tales from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, including six full-cast dramas and a short story read by Benedict Cumberbatch In the first half of the 20th century, the detective story exploded in popularity. Innovative authors penned whodunits, whydunits and...

Chesterton's allegorical masterpiece is a surreal, psychologically thrilling novel that centres on seven anarchists in turn of the century London who call themselves by the names of days of the week. The story begins when poet Gabriel Syme is recruited as a detective to a secret anarchist division of Scotland Yard by a shrouded, nameless person. Syme infiltrates a secret meeting of anarchists who are intent on destroying the world and becomes known as 'Thursday', one of the seven members of the Central Anarchist Council.

Father Brown, G. K. Chesterton's lovable little Norfolk priest, has an uncanny knack of unraveling mysteries that leave lesser mortals floundering. His sympathetic understanding of human nature never deserts him, even when he himself is touched by a breath of scandal, thanks to the hasty conclusions of a crusading newspaperman. In this collection, Father Brown uses his distinctive style of deduction to solve the seemingly insoluble.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) was a British writer, philosopher, lay theologian, and literary critic. Chesterton wrote around 80 books, several hundred poems, some 200 short stories, several plays, plus 4,000 essays and newspaper columns. He was a columnist for the Daily News and The Illustrated London News.

A collection of reprinted articles on a wide-range of subjects, all in the unique style of G. K. Chesterton. Using wit, paradox, and good humor he “defends” a series of seeming harmless things that need no defense, and in so doing he exposes many of the broken assumptions and dogmatic notions of secular humanism and other trends of his age and of ours. (Summary by Ray Clare)

“For the Irish Question has never been discussed in England. Men have discussed Home Rule; but those who advocated it most warmly, and as I think wisely, did not even know what the Irish meant by Home. Men have talked about Unionism; but they have never even dared to propose Union. A Unionist ought to mean a man who is not even conscious of the boundary of the two countries; who can walk across the frontier of fairyland, and not even notice the walking haystack. As a fact, the Unionist always shoots at the haystack; though he never hits it. But the limitation is not limited to Unionists; as ...

"Second, when telling such lies as may seem necessary to your international standing, do not tell the lies to the people who know the truth. Do not tell the Eskimos that snow is bright green; nor tell the negroes in Africa that the sun never shines in that Dark Continent. Rather tell the Eskimos that the sun never shines in Africa; and then, turning to the tropical Africans, see if they will believe that snow is green. Similarly, the course indicated for you is to slander the Russians to the English and the English to the Russians; and there are hundreds of good old reliable slanders which can...

Most Eugenists are Euphemists. I mean merely that short words startle them, while long words soothe them. And they are utterly incapable of translating the one into the other, however obviously they mean the same thing. Say to them "The persuasive and even coercive powers of the citizen should enable him to make sure that the burden of longevity in the previous generation does not become disproportionate and intolerable, especially to the females"; say this to them and they will sway slightly to and fro like babies sent to sleep in cradles. Say to them "Murder your mother," and they sit up ...

In The Napoleon of Notting Hill, his first novel, G. K. Chesterton creates a witty satire of staid government, set in a London of the future. Auberon Quinn, a common clerk who looks like a cross between a baby and an owl and is often seen standing on his head, is one day told that he has been randomly selected to be His Majesty the King. He decides to turn London into a medieval carnival for his own amusement - with delightful results.

A collection of 5 articles/essays and 2 letters written by G.K. Chesterton in "The Century Illustrated Magazine". The pubilcation dates range from 1912-1923. (Summary by Maria Therese)

“These papers were originally published as prefaces to the separate books of Dickens in one of the most extensive of those cheap libraries of the classics which are one of the real improvements of recent times. Thus they were harmless, being diluted by, or rather drowned in Dickens. My scrap of theory was a mere dry biscuit to be taken with the grand tawny port of great English comedy; and by most people it was not taken at all--like the biscuit. Nevertheless the essays were not in intention so aimless as they appear in fact. I had a general notion of what needed saying about Dickens to the ...

A collection of the newspaper columns/essays written by G.K. Chesterton for "The New Witness", under the heading "At the Sign of the World's End". This project compiles articles from 1922. (Summary by Maria Therese)

A collection of 35 essays by G.K. Chesterton originally published in his weekly columns in "The Illustrated London News" and the "New Witness". The subjects vary greatly from lamp posts to Jane Austen's Emma, from "On Pigs as Pets" to Mormonism and Christian Science. (Summary by Maria Therese)

Four articles/essays written by G.K. Chesterton for "The British Review". These were published in 1913 and 1914. (Summary by Maria Therese)

Another delightful and sharply pointed excursion into the topics of the day, and of our day as well, with Gilbert Keith Chesterton. Here he uses his wit and mastery of paradox to bring into focus a number of historical persons who in many ways typify the people who presently shape our world and who in their own right have already shaped Western civilization. These reprinted magazine articles are filled with his good-natured wit and devastating ability to use reductio ad absurdum to destroy the popular myths that drive our society at full-speed into, and expose the utter nonsense that underlies...

A series of five essays by G.K. Chesterton, published in "Black and White" magazine in 1903, under the heading "The Creed of a Credulous Person". (Summary by Maria Therese)

A Collection of 31 essays from G.K. Chesterton. “I have strung these things together on a slight enough thread; but as the things themselves are slight, it is possible that the thread (and the metaphor) may manage to hang together. These notes range over very variegated topics and in many cases were made at very different times. They concern all sorts of things from lady barristers to cave-men, and from psycho-analysis to free verse. Yet they have this amount of unity in their wandering, that they all imply that it is only a more traditional spirit that is truly able to wander.” (From the ...

Gilbert Keith Chesterton was an influential English writer of the early 20th century. His prolific and diverse output included journalism, philosophy, poetry, biography, Christian apologetics, fantasy, and detective fiction. Chesterton has been called the "prince of paradox." He wrote in an off-hand, whimsical prose studded with startling formulations. Chesterton wrote about 4000 essays on various subjects, and "Alarms and Discursions is one of his collections. (Summary adapted from Wikipedia by Karen Merline.)

“None of us think enough of these things on which the eye rests. But don't let us let the eye rest. Why should the eye be so lazy? Let us exercise the eye until it learns to see startling facts that run across the landscape as plain as a painted fence. Let us be ocular athletes. Let us learn to write essays on a stray cat or a coloured cloud. I have attempted some such thing in what follows; but anyone else may do it better, if anyone else will only try. ” (Gilbert Keith Chesterton)