G. K. Chesterton

Chesterton was six foot four and around twenty stone, wore a cape and a crumpled hat, carried a swordstick, and was so reliably absent-minded that he once wired his wife from the wrong town: "Am in Market Harborough. Where ought I to be?" He trained as an artist, drifted into journalism, and then wrote roughly eighty books, four thousand newspaper essays and two hundred short stories, apparently without effort.

He argued for a living. He debated Shaw, Wells and Clarence Darrow in packed halls for years, opposing nearly everything they believed, and remained close friends with the first two throughout — which says as much about him as anything he wrote. Father Brown, the small priest who solves crimes by understanding sin from the inside, was modelled on a priest he knew.

The difficulty in reading him now is real. His journalism returns repeatedly to the "Jewish question" and carries tropes that are antisemitic by any plain reading, even though he condemned Hitler's persecution explicitly and early. The Church's own examination of his cause for canonisation, which did not proceed in 2019, cited that record among its reasons.