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)
(This one probably won't help the old canonization cause)
In September of 1918, Chesterton attended an enthusiastic gathering of twenty-five British authors to discuss how literature could help the war effort. The meeting was convened by the head of War Propaganda, C.F.G. Masterman, and was also attended by (among others) Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy, H.G. Wells, James Barrie, John Galsworthy, John Masefield, and John Buchan. The government proposed to subsidize patriotic books, pamphlets, articles and lectures by these writers. [Chisholm and Davie, Lord Beaverbrook, New York, 1993, p. 154]
