Collection: G.K. Chesterton

G.K. Chesterton, 1874 to 1936, was a working London journalist who argued for a living, in print, several times a week, for decades. He wrote essays, criticism, biography, detective stories and verse, and he was famously generous to the people he disagreed with, which is rarer than the arguing.

The Man Who Was Thursday, published in 1908, is a thriller about a cell of anarchists in which almost nobody turns out to be who he claims. It is funny, fast, and quietly unnerving, and it keeps pulling the floor out from under the reader at the point where he thinks he has it worked out.

For anyone who suspects the two sides on offer are quietly the same side, this is the book. He gives you back your nerve to keep asking.