G. K. Chesterton
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50 free G. K. Chesterton trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
G. K. Chesterton wrote detective stories, novels, poems, biographies and thousands of newspaper essays, and argued cheerfully with most of the leading minds of his day. He was also one of the most quotable and most recognisable figures of his time. This quiz starts with The Donkey, his best-loved short poem, and what its speaker remembers. From there it moves through the Father Brown mysteries and their screen versions, the novels and long poems, his friendships and public debates, his conversion and his ideas about politics and property. It is written for readers who know him from one corner of his work and want to test the rest: fans of the television priest, students meeting The Donkey for the first time, and anyone who has seen his name under a quotation and wondered who he was.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01G. K. Chesterton's poem The Donkey ends with the animal recalling its hour of glory on which feast day?
Palm Sunday
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.
Q 02Which heavy metal band opened its 1983 song Revelations with lines from a hymn by G. K. Chesterton?
Iron Maiden
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.
Q 03A crater named after the author G. K. Chesterton in 2012 lies on which world of the solar system?
Mercury
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.
Q 04G. K. Chesterton's rule for reformers says never to remove which object before learning why it is there?
A fence
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.
Q 05Which Oxford don said G. K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man helped bring about his conversion?
C. S. Lewis
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.
Q 06Which director borrowed only the title of G. K. Chesterton's The Man Who Knew Too Much for two of his thrillers?
Alfred Hitchcock
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.
Q 07Which playwright and debating rival joined G. K. Chesterton in playing cowboys for an unreleased silent film?
George Bernard Shaw
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.
Q 08Which actor took the title role in 2013 when the BBC adapted G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories?
Mark Williams
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.
Q 09Which 1990 comic novel about the end of the world carries a dedication to the author G. K. Chesterton?
Good Omens
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.
Q 10Which future leader of Indian independence was thunderstruck by a 1909 newspaper column by G. K. Chesterton?
Mahatma Gandhi
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.
Q 11Which 1900 verse collection, G. K. Chesterton's second book, includes his most famous poem, The Donkey?
The Wild Knight
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.
Q 12Which actor played G. K. Chesterton's priest in the 1954 film Father Brown and became a Catholic two years later?
Alec Guinness
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.
Q 13Which French jewel thief does G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown outwit, reform and turn into a detective friend?
Flambeau
Q 21In G. K. Chesterton's poem The Donkey, the animal mocks its own long ears by comparing them to which things?
Wings
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.
Q 22Which woman did G. K. Chesterton marry in 1901, later crediting her with leading him back to Christian faith?
Frances Blogg
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.
Q 23In which Buckinghamshire town did G. K. Chesterton settle in 1909, live until his death and lie buried?
Beaconsfield
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.
Q 14In G. K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, the poet Gabriel Syme infiltrates a council of which radicals?
Anarchists
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.
Q 15Which Saxon king is the hero of G. K. Chesterton's epic The Ballad of the White Horse, battling the Danes?
Alfred the Great
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.
Q 16G. K. Chesterton's 1906 critical study is credited with reviving popular interest in which Victorian novelist?
Charles Dickens
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.
Q 17Which poet and essayist was G. K. Chesterton's closest ally, their surnames fused into one nickname?
Hilaire Belloc
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.
Q 18Which economic creed did G. K. Chesterton champion as a third way between capitalism and socialism?
Distributism
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.
Q 19G. K. Chesterton usually wore a cape and crumpled hat, with a cigar in his mouth and which weapon in hand?
A swordstick
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.
Q 20G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown owes his encyclopaedic knowledge of crime to which routine duty of a priest?
Hearing confessions
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.
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.
Q 24G. K. Chesterton served from 1930 as the first president of which society of British mystery writers?
The Detection Club
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.
Q 25G. K. Chesterton illustrated the first book of which comic four-line verse form, invented by his friend E. C. Bentley?
The clerihew
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.
Q 26G. K. Chesterton's rousing 1911 poem about Don John of Austria defeating an Ottoman fleet is named after which battle?
Lepanto
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.
Q 27Which 1908 book did G. K. Chesterton write as a companion to his earlier Heretics?
Orthodoxy
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.
Q 28When absent-minded G. K. Chesterton wired his wife to ask where he ought to be, what was her reported one-word reply?
Home
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.
Q 29For which literary honour was G. K. Chesterton nominated in 1935, the year before he died?
The Nobel Prize
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.
Q 30G. K. Chesterton pictures Father Brown as a short, plain priest in shapeless clothes who carries which everyday object?
An umbrella
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.