Well, not quite what you're looking for perhaps, but close (quite literally! Heh)....
Quoted in an article (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123032986340736063.html) posted just today on the Wall Street Journal's website (emphasis mine):
...The most famous single work among Chesterton's 90-plus volumes of fiction, stories, poems, plays and essays is "The Man Who Was Thursday," also published in 1908 and currently in print in no less than seven editions. Chesterton jokingly dismissed it as "a very melodramatic sort of moonshine." Perhaps, but it is also one of the most intriguing and enduring mystery-adventure stories ever written, a phantasmagorical spy story replete with secret identities, sword fights, and more chases than a James Bond movie. (My favorites involve elephants and hot-air balloons.)
Set in a surrealistic London of shadowy, labyrinthine streets, the plot is populated by poets posing as undercover policemen and policemen pretending to be anarchists. This may sound slapstick, but "The Man Who Was Thursday" presages the dark clouds gathering over Europe before World War I.
An air of impending dread pervades the novel; the term "anarchist," after all, stirred the fear 100 years ago that "terrorist" does today.
Though largely ignored when it was first published, "Thursday" attracted, in time, an enormous cult following, including George Orwell (who was also impressed by Chesterton's first political fable, "The Napoleon of Notting Hill," a work set in the year 1984), Argentinean shortstory writer Jorge Luis Borges, and Michael Collins. Yes, that Michael Collins. At the 1921 peace negotiations between Ireland and Britain, Collins told a British official that he had learned much from "Thursday," particularly the lesson that "if you don't seem to be hiding, nobody hunts you out."
Surely no other writer in any century can claim a following that includes Irish rebels, Latin American fabulists and Christian apologists...
BTW, believe it or not, I do read other authors. Honest. :-)
no subject
Bring on the Victorian hot air balloons!
Well, not quite what you're looking for perhaps, but close (quite literally! Heh)....
Quoted in an article (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123032986340736063.html) posted just today on the Wall Street Journal's website (emphasis mine):
...The most famous single work among Chesterton's 90-plus volumes of fiction, stories, poems, plays and essays is "The Man Who Was Thursday," also published in 1908 and currently in print in no less than seven editions. Chesterton jokingly dismissed it as "a very melodramatic sort of moonshine." Perhaps, but it is also one of the most intriguing and enduring mystery-adventure stories ever written, a phantasmagorical spy story replete with secret identities, sword fights, and more chases than a James Bond movie. (My favorites involve elephants and hot-air balloons.)
Set in a surrealistic London of shadowy, labyrinthine streets, the plot is populated by poets posing as undercover policemen and policemen pretending to be anarchists. This may sound slapstick, but "The Man Who Was Thursday" presages the dark clouds gathering over Europe before World War I.
An air of impending dread pervades the novel; the term "anarchist," after all, stirred the fear 100 years ago that "terrorist" does today.
Though largely ignored when it was first published, "Thursday" attracted, in time, an enormous cult following, including George Orwell (who was also impressed by Chesterton's first political fable, "The Napoleon of Notting Hill," a work set in the year 1984), Argentinean shortstory writer Jorge Luis Borges, and Michael Collins. Yes, that Michael Collins. At the 1921 peace negotiations between Ireland and Britain, Collins told a British official that he had learned much from "Thursday," particularly the lesson that "if you don't seem to be hiding, nobody hunts you out."
Surely no other writer in any century can claim a following that includes Irish rebels, Latin American fabulists and Christian apologists...
BTW, believe it or not, I do read other authors. Honest. :-)