Pea Green, Pink Spots

What a very nice book this is. I say that at once, because the title, though unexceptionable, may put other readers on their guard as it did me: one suspects an exercise in revisionism, a gleaming-eyed conscription of an author too long in his grave to resist. But Mrs. Canovan has no desire to “claim” Chesterton. She merely seeks to do justice to his political thought, respectfully expounding it and just as respectfully criticizing it. The result is judicious and readable.

There is what looks to me like a Chesterton revival under way, and high time too. Is there a more refreshing writer in the world? Yet nobody has taken his political thought very seriously lately, except perhaps Garry Wills, whose Chesterton: Man and Mask (may it come back into print!) is the finest study of all. Chesterton is usually treated as a quixotic “character,” and his Distributism can easily be dismissed as one of his eccentric affectations, like the famous cape that sailed behind his great globe of a body. To speak of a “populist” in England is to flirt with the flippant paradox of which Chesterton himself is often accused.

JS

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Joseph Sobran

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What a very nice book this is. I say that at once, because the title, though unexceptionable, may put other readers on their guard as it did me: one suspects an exercise in revisionism, a gleaming-eyed conscription of an author too long in his grave to resist. But Mrs. Canovan has no desire to “claim” Chesterton. She merely seeks to do justice to his political thought, respectfully expounding it and just as respectfully criticizing it. The result is judicious and readable.

There is what looks to me like a Chesterton revival under way, and high time too. Is there a more refreshing writer in the world? Yet nobody has taken his political thought very seriously lately, except perhaps Garry Wills, whose Chesterton: Man and Mask (may it come back into print!) is the finest study of all. Chesterton is usually treated as a quixotic “character,” and his Distributism can easily be dismissed as one of his eccentric affectations, like the famous cape that sailed behind his great globe of a body. To speak of a “populist” in England is to flirt with the flippant paradox of which Chesterton himself is often accused.