A Preference for Torquemada

Michael Wood

  • Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy: The Making of GKC 1874-1908 by William Oddie
    Oxford, 401 pp, £25.00, November 2008, ISBN 978 0 19 955165 1
  • The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton
    Atlantic, 187 pp, £7.99, December 2008, ISBN 978 1 84354 905 5

‘I have often had a fancy,’ G.K. Chesterton wrote in his book Orthodoxy (1908), ‘for writing a romance about an English yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas.’ The man would arrive, ‘armed to the teeth and talking by signs’, and try to plant the British flag on the Brighton Pavilion. A little later Chesterton says: ‘I am that man in a yacht. I discovered England.’ He likes this trope and returns to it in detail in The Everlasting Man (1925), adding the variant story of the boy who couldn’t recognise the exotic secret of his village until he got far enough away from it. ‘That, I think, is a true picture of the progress of any really independent intelligence today.’ Home is not only where the heart is, it is our only chance of having a heart. Everything else is an abstraction.

You are not Logged In

  • If you have already registered login here
  • If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
  • If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
  • If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
  • If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions

Vol. 31 No. 7 · 9 April 2009 » Michael Wood » A Preference for Torquemada (print version)
Pages 8-10 | 4267 words