of the essays featured in the collection include: ‘On Seriousness’, ‘Tennyson’, ‘The Japanese’, ‘Christian Science’, ‘The Evolution of Emma’, ‘Questions of Divorce’, ‘Mormonism’, ‘Dickens Again’, ‘George Wyndham’, and ‘On Monsters’.

A superb collection for readers of Chesterton, which covers a wide array of topics on everything from religion and nationalities to poltics and different influential novelists.


Known as the ‘Prince of Paradox,’ Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874 – 1936) was an English author, philosopher, and literary critic. An unparalleled essayist, he produced over four thousand essays during his lifetime, alongside eighty novels and two hundred short stories. Himself both a modernist and devout Catholic, he is remembered best for his priest-detective short stories ‘Father Brown’, and his metaphysical thriller ‘The Man Who Was Thursday’. In his lifetime, Chesterton befriended and debated some of the greatest thinkers of the age, such as George Bernard Shore, H. G. Wells, and Bertrand Russell, while his works went on to inspire figures including T. S. Eliot, Michael Collins, and Mahatma Gandhi. According to his autobiography, Chesterton and Shaw also played cowboys in a silent movie that was never released.