G.K. Chesterton wrote every day of his life, seldom revising and missing as many targets as he hit. But because of the sheer magnitude of the output, that still leaves a monument of achievement, a mountain of words proceeding from a mountain of a man. Chesterton was the living contradiction of Cyril Connolly's famous adage, since it could be said that, inside this fat man, there was an even fatter one wildly signalling to be let out. And in the newspaper articles, the editions of GK's Weekly, the poems (most of them execrable), the Father Brown stories, the fantastical novels, the works of criticism, the religious apologetics, the travel pieces, the parodies, the many public speeches, the Introductions to other people's books, the Even Fatter Man had many outlets for his energies.

LRB 12 December 1996 | PDF Download