Background: When I was the editor of Gilbert Magazine, I was responsible for the "Tremendous Trifles" column. It was occasionally hard to find a sufficient amount of interesting GKC material to fill the page, so John Peterson sent me a file full of Chesterton ancedotes. They were idiosyncratic, historical, and Chestertonian. He gave me permission to use them here. I hope y'all find them as interesting as I have over the years. Most of them have never been published.
Chesterton Short(s)
From a magazine article by the social historian Philip Jenkins:
In the 1970s, a British newspaper polled serving and former intelligence operatives about which fictional work best captured the spirit of their profession, presumably expecting a chorus of praise for Tom Clancy, John le Carre, or even Ian Fleming. The answer, however, was G.K. Chesterton's little read The Man Who Was Thursday, a phantasmagoric Edwardian novel that depicts a battle between the British police and the leadership of the Supreme Anarchist Council.
Professor Jenkins was making a point about covert policing in America today. [Chronicles, Jan 1994, 42]
