Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Conrad Noel married Gilbert and Frances at Kensington Parish Church on June 28, 1901. As Gilbert knelt down the price ticket on the sole of one of his new shoes became plainly v...

THE CONSIDERATION OF the Distributist League that flowed out of the foundation of _G.K.'s Weekly_ in 1925 has carried us some years ahead of our story. Back then to 1926 when Fr...

SHORTLY AFTER THE war Gilbert and Frances set out on their travels, going in 1919 to Palestine, home through Italy early in 1920, and starting out again the following year for a...

_He wished to discover America. His gay and thoughtless friends, who could not understand him, pointed out that America had already been discovered, I think they said by Christo...

I ought to have written to you a long time ago, to thank you for your kind letter which I received when I had recovered and still more for many other kindnesses that seem to hav...

IN HIS _Autobiography_ Gilbert Chesterton has set down his belief that the Marconi Scandal will be seen by historians as a landmark in English history. To him personally the rev...

ONE MAIN DIFFICULTY in writing biography lies in the various strands that run through every human life. It is as I have already said impossible to keep a perfect chronological o...

THE BOER WAR--and the whole country enthusiastically behind it. The Liberal Party as a whole went with the Conservatives. The leading Fabians--Bernard Shaw, Mr. and Mrs. Sidney...

DURING THE EARLIER YEARS of the _New Witness_ Gilbert had nothing to do with the editing, and his contributions to it were only part of the continuing volume of his weekly journ...

CURIOUSLY ENOUGH Gilbert does not in the _Autobiography_ speak of any school except St. Paul's. He went however first to Colet Court, usually called at that time Bewsher's, from...

IN 1909, WITH _Orthodoxy_ well behind him, and _George Bernard Shaw_ just published, Gilbert and his wife left London for the small country town that was to be their home for th...

_This chapter was read by G.B.S. His remarks are printed in footnotes. [A facsimile of the] one page altered substantially by him is [omitted in this plain-text electronic editi...

COULD GILBERT HAVE divided his life between literary work, his home at Top Meadow, and those other elements called in the _Autobiography_ "Friendship and Foolery," that life mig...

GILBERT SYMPATHIZED WITH his future mother-in-law's anxiety at Frances's engagement to "a self-opinionated scarecrow," but I doubt if it at all quickly occurred to him that the...

DOROTHY TOLD ME one day in 1935 that Gilbert had written the beginning of an autobiography some years before but had laid it aside. She had, she said, a superstitious feeling ab...

THE MONTHS THAT followed the signing of the Armistice were the darkest in Gilbert Chesterton's life. Nothing but the immense natural high spirits of the _New Witness_ group coul...

ONE OF THE commonest of biographers' problems is the question of quarrels and broken friendships. At the distance of time separating a life from its record some of these look so...

IN THE LAST chapter, this chapter and to a considerable extent those that follow, down to the break made by Gilbert's illness and the war of 1914, it is unavoidable that the sam...

_To say we must have Socialism or Capitalism is like saying we must choose between all men going into monasteries and a few men having harems. If I denied such a sexual alternat...

THERE IS ONE part of this story that has not been told with the rest: Our Lady's share in Gilbert's conversion. The Chesterton family had been quite without the strange Protesta...

G. K. CHESTERTON: A CRITICISM (published anonymously in 1908) was a challenge thrown to the world of letters, for it demanded the recognition of Chesterton as a force to be reck...

A CURIOUS LITTLE incident comes towards the end of Gilbert's time at the Slade School. In a letter he wrote to E. C. Bentley we see him, on the eve of his 21st birthday, being i...

THE PUBLICATION OF _What's Wrong With the World_ brings us to 1910. Gilbert had, as we have seen, originally intended to call the book _What's Wrong?_ laying some emphasis on th...

WHEN ALL GILBERT'S friends were at Oxford or Cambridge, he used to say how glad he was that his own choice had been a different one. He never sighed for Oxford. He never regrett...

I am afraid that chronologically, or by the clock, I am relatively late in sending you my most warm congratulations--and yet I do assure you that I write as one still thrilled a...

_Philosophy is either eternal or it is not philosophy. . . . A cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos. A man can n...

_I hate to be influenced. I like to be commanded or to be free. In both of these my own soul can take a clear and conscious part: for when I am free it must be for something tha...

THIS CHAPTER CAN be written only by Gilbert himself. It might seem that he had no words left for an emotion heightened beyond the love of his friends and the joyous acceptance o...

GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON was born on May 29, 1874 at a house in Sheffield Terrace, Campden Hill, just below the great tower of the Waterworks which so much impressed his childis...

Suddenly in the midst of friends, Of brothers known to me more and more, And their secrets, histories, tastes, hero-worships, Schemes, love-affairs, known to me Suddenly I felt...

I AM WRITING THIS chapter at a table facing Notre Dame de Paris in front of a café filled with arguing French workmen--in the presence of God and of Man; and I feel as if I unde...

IT IS USUAL to open a biography with some account of the subject's ancestry. Chesterton, in his _Browning_, after some excellent foolery about pedigree-hunting, makes the sugges...

CHESTERTON SPOKE ONCE of the keen joy for the intellect of discovering the causes of things, but he was not greatly interested in science. He would have said that although the p...