50 Fun Facts About G. K. Chesterton

G. K. Chesterton's poem The Donkey ends with the animal recalling its hour of glory on which feast day?

Palm Sunday is the day the despised donkey remembers: it carried Christ into Jerusalem while the crowds cheered. Chesterton holds that reveal back until the last of the poem's four short stanzas.

Which heavy metal band opened its 1983 song Revelations with lines from a hymn by G. K. Chesterton?

Iron Maiden borrowed the opening of Chesterton's hymn O God of Earth and Altar for Revelations, on the album Piece of Mind. Singer Bruce Dickinson said he had a fondness for hymns.

A crater named after the author G. K. Chesterton in 2012 lies on which world of the solar system?

Mercury holds the crater, because most craters on that planet are named after famous writers, artists and composers. Radar suggests its permanently shadowed floor hides a deposit of water ice.

G. K. Chesterton's rule for reformers says never to remove which object before learning why it is there?

A fence across a road was the example in Chesterton's 1929 book The Thing: a reformer who sees no use for it should go away and think. The idea, that a rule's purpose must be understood before it is scrapped, now carries his name.

Which Oxford don said G. K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man helped bring about his conversion?

C. S. Lewis called The Everlasting Man the best popular apologetic he knew. He also placed it on his list of the ten books that most shaped his philosophy of life.

Which director borrowed only the title of G. K. Chesterton's The Man Who Knew Too Much for two of his thrillers?

Alfred Hitchcock used the title for his 1934 film and its 1956 remake because he held the film rights to some of the book's stories. Neither film shares anything else with Chesterton's detective tales.

Which playwright and debating rival joined G. K. Chesterton in playing cowboys for an unreleased silent film?

George Bernard Shaw sparred with Chesterton in public for years, yet they stayed friends. In one much-told exchange, Chesterton said Shaw looked as if a famine had struck England; Shaw replied that he looked as if he had caused it.

Which actor took the title role in 2013 when the BBC adapted G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories?

Mark Williams, already familiar as Arthur Weasley in the Harry Potter films, plays the crime-solving priest. The series moves Chesterton's hero to the 1950s and a fictional Cotswold village called Kembleford.

Which 1990 comic novel about the end of the world carries a dedication to the author G. K. Chesterton?

Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, is dedicated to Chesterton. Gaiman grew up reading him in the library at school and later modelled the Sandman character Gilbert on him.

Which future leader of Indian independence was thunderstruck by a 1909 newspaper column by G. K. Chesterton?

Mahatma Gandhi was so delighted by the piece, published on 18 September 1909, that he told the newspaper Indian Opinion to reprint it for its own readers.

Which 1900 verse collection, G. K. Chesterton's second book, includes his most famous poem, The Donkey?

The Wild Knight came out in 1900, the year Chesterton published his first two books, both of them poetry. Its title piece is a short verse drama full of chivalry and mystery.

Which actor played G. K. Chesterton's priest in the 1954 film Father Brown and became a Catholic two years later?

Alec Guinness was on location in Burgundy, still in costume, when a local child mistook him for a real priest. He was received into the Church in 1956.

Which French jewel thief does G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown outwit, reform and turn into a detective friend?

Flambeau is an alias, the French word for a flaming torch; the thief's real surname turns out to be Duroc. He gives up crime after Father Brown persuades him to hand back his loot.

In G. K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, the poet Gabriel Syme infiltrates a council of which radicals?

Anarchists sit on the seven-man council, each code-named after a day of the week. Syme then finds that nearly all of his fellow plotters are undercover policemen like himself.

Which Saxon king is the hero of G. K. Chesterton's epic The Ballad of the White Horse, battling the Danes?

Alfred the Great beats the Danes at the Battle of Ethandun in the poem, helped by a vision of the Virgin Mary. Chesterton's own prefatory note admits the long ballad is legend, not history.

G. K. Chesterton's 1906 critical study is credited with reviving popular interest in which Victorian novelist?

Charles Dickens owed part of his 20th-century revival to the book, which also prompted scholars to look at him afresh. T. S. Eliot judged it the best essay on that author ever written.

Which poet and essayist was G. K. Chesterton's closest ally, their surnames fused into one nickname?

Hilaire Belloc and Chesterton were dubbed the Chesterbelloc, and Chesterton followed his friend into the Catholic Church in 1922. Both men attacked capitalism and socialism alike.

Which economic creed did G. K. Chesterton champion as a third way between capitalism and socialism?

Distributism wants property and political power spread as widely as possible, among small owners instead of the state or big business. Chesterton argued for it in his own paper, G. K.'s Weekly.

G. K. Chesterton usually wore a cape and crumpled hat, with a cigar in his mouth and which weapon in hand?

A swordstick, a blade hidden inside a walking cane, completed the outfit. Chesterton stood 6 feet 4 inches tall and weighed around 20 stone, so the caped figure was hard to miss.

G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown owes his encyclopaedic knowledge of crime to which routine duty of a priest?

Hearing confessions has taught the little priest how criminals think, so he solves cases by imagining himself into the culprit's mind. His plain, harmless looks lead suspects to underestimate him.

In G. K. Chesterton's poem The Donkey, the animal mocks its own long ears by comparing them to which things?

Wings is the image: the donkey calls its ears errant ones, one stroke in a self-portrait of a monstrous misfit among four-footed beasts. The self-mockery sets up the triumphant final stanza.

Which woman did G. K. Chesterton marry in 1901, later crediting her with leading him back to Christian faith?

Frances Blogg ran her husband's working life for 35 years, keeping his diary and accounts and negotiating with his publishers. He dedicated The Ballad of the White Horse to her.

In which Buckinghamshire town did G. K. Chesterton settle in 1909, live until his death and lie buried?

Beaconsfield kept the Chestertons for the rest of their lives; he died there in June 1936, 16 days after his 62nd birthday. A plaque marks the couple's former house in Grove Road.

G. K. Chesterton served from 1930 as the first president of which society of British mystery writers?

The Detection Club counted Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers among its members, and Sayers wrote its fanciful initiation oath. Chesterton's old friend E. C. Bentley followed him as president.

G. K. Chesterton illustrated the first book of which comic four-line verse form, invented by his friend E. C. Bentley?

The clerihew takes its name from Bentley's middle name and pokes fun at a famous person in two rhymed couplets. Chesterton drew the pictures for Biography for Beginners in 1905.

G. K. Chesterton's rousing 1911 poem about Don John of Austria defeating an Ottoman fleet is named after which battle?

Lepanto celebrates the Holy League's sea victory of 1571. The poem's galloping rhythm made it a favourite with soldiers of the First World War, the novelist John Buchan among them.

Which 1908 book did G. K. Chesterton write as a companion to his earlier Heretics?

Orthodoxy was written after a critic complained that Heretics attacked everyone else's beliefs without stating Chesterton's own. It has become a classic of Christian apologetics.

When absent-minded G. K. Chesterton wired his wife to ask where he ought to be, what was her reported one-word reply?

Home was the answer she is said to have sent after he wired from Market Harborough, having forgotten where he was bound. Chesterton told the story himself, though he left out her reply.

For which literary honour was G. K. Chesterton nominated in 1935, the year before he died?

The Nobel Prize nomination came late in a career of around 80 books, some 200 short stories and 4,000 essays. Chesterton died the following June without the award.

G. K. Chesterton pictures Father Brown as a short, plain priest in shapeless clothes who carries which everyday object?

An umbrella, large and shabby, is the priest's trademark, and his harmless look is his best disguise. That unthreatening manner makes him a forerunner of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple.

In G. K. Chesterton's poem The Donkey, the animal calls itself a walking parody made by which figure?

The devil's parody of a proper four-legged beast is how the donkey sees itself, with a monstrous head and a sickening cry. The insult makes its moment of honour in the closing lines land all the harder.

Which Yorkshire parish priest inspired Father Brown and later received G. K. Chesterton into the Catholic Church?

John O'Connor, an Irish-born priest serving in the Bradford area, met Chesterton at Keighley in 1904. The two stayed friends for more than 30 years, and one story even calls the detective the Reverend J. Brown.

Which 1910 story, G. K. Chesterton's first Father Brown mystery, has a Paris police chief trailing two priests?

The Blue Cross first ran in the Saturday Evening Post under a different title. The little priest leaves a trail of oddities, such as swapped salt and sugar, so that the police can follow him.

Which Irish revolutionary leader was almost fanatically attached to G. K. Chesterton's The Napoleon of Notting Hill?

Michael Collins also drew a working rule from The Man Who Was Thursday: if you did not seem to be hiding, nobody hunted you out.

Which Argentine master of the short story named G. K. Chesterton as an influence and likened him to Edgar Allan Poe?

Jorge Luis Borges told the interviewer Richard Burgin that Chesterton knew how to make the most of a detective story.

Which movement did G. K. Chesterton attack in a 1922 book, having opposed Britain's Mental Deficiency Act of 1913?

Eugenics and Other Evils mocked the idea that poverty came from bad breeding. Chesterton warned that a law aimed at the so-called mentally defective was worded loosely enough to catch any tramp or eccentric.

Which war did the young journalist G. K. Chesterton oppose against most of the British press, as an enemy of empire?

The Second Boer War, Chesterton thought, betrayed Britain's own principles. He backed the fight against Germany in 1914 just as fiercely, seeing it as a crusade against Prussian militarism.

As a young man fascinated by the occult, G. K. Chesterton experimented with which device alongside his brother Cecil?

Ouija boards belonged to a dark spell in his youth: he later wrote that he was a pagan at twelve and a complete agnostic by sixteen. He was nearly fifty before he became a Catholic.

Étienne Gilson called G. K. Chesterton's 1933 biography the best book ever written on which medieval saint?

Thomas Aquinas was dictated at speed: his secretary recalled him leafing through just one of the books she fetched before dictating the second half. Gilson, a leading scholar of the saint, said it put experts to shame.

In G. K. Chesterton's poem The Donkey, what does the starved and mocked animal say it still keeps?

Its secret is the memory of one glorious hour, which no beating can take away. The animal stays dumb under the blows, then scorns its abusers as fools in the last stanza.

Which slim book of comic verse, illustrated by the author, was G. K. Chesterton's first published book in 1900?

Greybeards at Play held just four poems, set beside the author's own whimsical drawings. When Chesterton died in 1936, many obituaries predicted he would be best remembered as a poet.

Where in London, at a department of University College, did the young G. K. Chesterton train to become an illustrator?

The Slade School of Art taught him drawing while he also sat in on literature classes, though he left without a degree in either. He later illustrated his friend Bentley's first collection of comic verse.

In which London district, known for its royal palace and gardens, was G. K. Chesterton born in 1874?

Kensington's Campden Hill was his birthplace, on 29 May 1874. His first novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, is set in the same corner of the city, 80 years into the future.

Which London school, founded in 1509 by John Colet, educated G. K. Chesterton alongside his friend E. C. Bentley?

St Paul's gave him the lifelong friendship of Bentley, to whom he later dedicated The Man Who Was Thursday. He moved on to art classes and never took a university degree.

In a 1914 mock trial over the murder of Edwin Drood, which courtroom role did G. K. Chesterton take?

Judge was his part in the trial of John Jasper, staged on 7 January 1914. His brother Cecil took part in the proceedings as well.

For which weekly paper did G. K. Chesterton write a column for some 30 years, beginning in 1905?

The Illustrated London News, founded in 1842, was the world's first illustrated weekly news magazine. Joseph Conrad and Arthur Conan Doyle also wrote for it.

Which priest and detective novelist preached at G. K. Chesterton's Requiem Mass in Westminster Cathedral in 1936?

Ronald Knox told the congregation that a whole generation had grown up so much under Chesterton's influence that it no longer noticed. Knox also drew up ten famous rules for writing fair detective stories.

Which G. K. Chesterton novel, about two men roaming England with a barrel of rum, contains The Rolling English Road?

The Flying Inn sends Humphrey Pump and Captain Patrick Dalroy around the country in a cart, using loopholes in the law to stay ahead of the police. Its famous poem first appeared in the New Witness in 1913.

Which Victorian poet was the subject of G. K. Chesterton's 1903 biography in the English Men of Letters series?

Robert Browning was a bold commission for a 29-year-old with a reputation for eccentricity. Chesterton later joked that the book held very few biographical facts, and that those were nearly all wrong.

Which two-word subtitle did G. K. Chesterton attach to his 1908 novel The Man Who Was Thursday?

A Nightmare warns readers not to take the plot at face value: the book has been described as a metaphysical thriller, and it ends in a surreal unmasking.