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“... Nietzsche, Hugo, Proust and Yeats as well as Michael Arlen, Clemence Dane, P.G. Wodehouse and G.K. Chesterton. Johnson kept lists of all the books she read (90 in 1931, although she was working full time), with ratings: ‘bunk’, sometimes, or ‘the worst rubbish of the year’, or ‘dull, dull, dull’. (This left its mark on her reviewing style.) The ...”

“... effectively began – as “The Greatest Day in Irish History”,’ Kenny writes. She cites G.K. Chesterton, who met a woman on a Dublin tram during the Congress. ‘Well, if it rains now,’ she said, ‘He’ll have brought it on Himself.’ Chesterton saw a banner hanging between two tenement houses: ‘God Bless Christ ...”

“... expanded in a scholarly footnote. He records that Borges writes ‘of the infinite, of China, of Chesterton, and of eternity’, that he sets his characters in archaic costumes within ‘Muslim, English, Chinese or Persian locales’: but he asserts that all his characters are Latin Americans – like the characters of Asturias, Carpentier and Garcia ...”

“... to avoid the flop into rationalism. Here he is close to the Roman Catholic mystery-writers. G.K. Chesterton wrote of Dickens’s mystery stories: ‘The secrecy is sensational; the secret is tame’; the villains in Dickens are ‘keeping something back from the author as well as from the reader. When the book closes we do not know their real secret. They ...”

“... art are well represented, but where are those redoubtable road-hogs, Kipling and Masefield? G.K. Chesterton, knowledgeable on sauces, listens patiently to Fothergill defending bread sauce, when properly made, and maintaining that mint sauce is the ruin of good lamb (only the hardiest ever asked for it). H.G. Wells, on being told there is a rat ...”

“... legacy. ‘Men who begin to fight the Church for the sake of freedom and humanity,’ G.K. Chesterton wrote a hundred years ago, ‘end by flinging away freedom and humanity if only they may fight the Church … The secularists have not wrecked divine things; but the secularists have wrecked secular things, if that is any comfort to them.’ Doesn’t ...”

“... something kinky or askew in ordinary human nature. Though Augustine is called a pessimist and G.K. Chesterton an optimist, it was Chesterton who said the reality of original sin can be observed at that point in a lovely summer afternoon when bored children start torturing the cat. A Jewish scholar tells me he thinks original ...”

“... and both suppress Juvenal’s reference to gilded nipples (‘papillis ... auratis’). As G.K. Chesterton once remarked, if a thing’s worth doing it’s worth doing badly. The rich variety of translations offered in the Oxford Book score hundreds of misses but thousands of hits. If the sage, pusillanimous doctrine of abstention had been applied we would ...”

“... founded Newnham College. In 1896, he joined his brothers-in-law, along with James Bryce, G.K. Chesterton, R.B. Haldane and Sir Oliver Lodge in founding the Synthetic Society, which, in an age of waning faith, set out to contribute towards a working philosophy of religious belief. A decade earlier, several of the same cast had joined Balfour in founding ...”

“... apologetics and soft-theological books by someone called Francis Schaeffer. I read Pascal and G.K. Chesterton and Kierkegaard and C.S. Lewis. I became interested in the philosophy of religion and in exegetical criticism. I heard about a place called L’Abri, in Switzerland – a kind of religious teaching community. That sounded good. The woman who lent me ...”

“... Aldous Huxley (‘When Greek meets Greek ...’) here speaks of ‘the tug of bores’; and G.K. Chesterton, more searchingly, insists that if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly. An ‘old Cockney Russian proverb’ (1980) says that ‘The family that spies together, sties together.’ (Why not ‘prays’ into ‘pries’?) Even the ad-men are ...”

“... Joseph Leidy. Then there are ‘men who knew too much’ (Robert Hooke, Alan Turing, G.K. Chesterton and, predictably, Alfred Hitchcock) and those whose knowledge ‘changed everything’ (Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell). Everything-knowers are admired, though with qualifications: the ‘know-it-all’ is an intellectual bully or a ...”

“... Browning really fitted into his time appears to have been initiated by Henry James, who, with G.K. Chesterton, is still unsurpassed as a critic of Browning. James witnessed the somewhat uproarious spectacle of Browning’s social success during the last ten or twenty years of his life; and the sensitive and sophisticated American critic was at one with many of ...”

“... Morris, H.M. Hyndman and Robert Blatchford, the cause had been taken up and redirected by G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc in the first decade of the 20th century. It had been resumed in the 1920s by various other figures, including H.J. Massingham, a former guild socialist who employed an amalgam of anthropological, archaeological and poetic sources to ...”

“... go for the next lesson.’ By the time the centenary of Carroll’s birth came round in 1932, G.K. Chesterton was fearful that nothing could be forgotten about ‘poor, poor, little Alice’, and that she had become the victim of a straitened sense of what constitutes an education: ‘She has not only been caught and made to do lessons; she has been forced to ...”