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

Father Brown (Chesterton's sharp-witted detective priest) and Flambeau (the reformed master-thief and Brown's constant companion) are on a little vacation in Norfolk, invited to visit the mysterious Prince Saradine. It doesn't go well. Sure, Flambeau gets some good fishing in, but there's also a duel with rapiers, a couple of murders, a hanging, a case of mistaken identity, an awkward family reunion, and a gang of surly Sicilians.

The Head of Caesar is a short story by Gilbert Keith Chesterton: There is somewhere in Brompton or Kensington an interminable avenue of tall houses, rich but largely empty, that looks like a terrace of tombs. The very steps up to the dark front doors seem as steep as the side of pyramids; one would hesitate to knock at the door, lest it should be opened by a mummy. But a yet more depressing feature in the grey facade is its telescopic length and changeless continuity.

"The Invisible Man" is a detective story written by G. K. Chesterton which concerns the nature of the crimes committed by one James Welkin, who had been harassing Laura Hope and menacing his romantic rival, Isidore Smythe (whom he would later murder), all without ever being seen.

Two men appeared simultaneously at the two ends of a sort of passage running along the side of the Apollo Theatre in the Adelphi. The evening daylight in the streets was large and luminous, opalescent and empty. The passage was comparatively long and dark, so each man could see the other as a mere black silhouette at the other end. Nevertheless, each man knew the other, even in that inky outline; for they were both men of striking appearance and they hated each other.

A satirical adventure novel, The Flying Inn is set in a quirky, dystopian England in which a new puritanical government has outlawed alcohol and other traditional English customs. Enter Humphrey Pump and his spirited friend Captain Patrick Dalroy, who take it upon themselves to supply what the government refuses.

Orthodoxy (1908) is a book by G. K. Chesterton that has become a classic of Christian apologetic. Chesterton considered this book a companion to his other work, Heretics, writing it expressly in response to G.S. Street's criticism of the earlier work, "that he was not going to bother about his theology until I had really stated mine".

This collection of 12 short stories is part of the Father Brown series, about a mystery-solving Catholic priest. In a refreshing contrast with the deductive detective Sherlock Holmes, Father Brown works intuitively. Through many years of hearing confessions, he has developed an uncanny ability to see inside the minds of criminals. Although he appears unobtrusive and dowdy, with a face "as round and dull as a Norfolk dumpling", he is also surprisingly worldly for a priest.

"The Queer Feet" deals with Flambeau wanting to steal the silverware of the members of the Twelve True Fishermen having their annual club dinner at Vernon Hotel. The Vernon Hotel is an exclusive hotel and a "topsy-turvy product" (Chesterton 1994, p. 51).

"The Secret Garden" is a short story by G. K. Chesterton. It was originally published in The Story-Teller in October 1910. It is the second story in the collection The Innocence of Father Brown. It is the second story about the French detective Valentin and completes his plot arc, begun in The Blue Cross.

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)

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)

“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 ...

“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 ...

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 ...

"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...