Word: chesterton
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...live in the present is like proposing to sit on a pin," wrote Chesterton. Science makes a more severe judgment. It calls living in the present psychotic. Not happy-go-lucky, devil-may-care living in the present, but the real thing. Some individuals by reason of accident or disease (generally alcoholism) suffer from what is called Korsakoff's psychosis: they have no memory. Not that they have forgotten their ancient childhood memories. They often retain these. But they have lost entirely the capacity to establish new memories. Everything they see, everything they hear, everything they think, they forget within...
...widespread preoccupation of mystery writers, whether to vary their stories or display newly found erudition or simply to write off a vacation trip on their tax returns. Ellis Peters offers her 14th chronicle of Brother Cadfael, a resolutely logical monk who is a 12th century forerunner of G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown, in The Hermit of Eyton Forest (Mysterious Press; 224 pages; $15.95). Peters' narratives suffer from cuteness and rarely make medieval people come alive as convincingly as, say, the ancient Greeks and Persians in the novels of Mary Renault. But she weaves a plot ably and is extremely effective...
...poetry, among other pursuits). Under the nom de crime Ellis Peters she has produced The Rose Rent (Morrow; 190 pages; $15.95), her 13th highly evocative novel about Brother Cadfael, a 12th century monk in the abbey town of Shrewsbury. Like his 20th century soulmate, Father Brown of the G.K. Chesterton stories, Cadfael attractively suggests that the highest act of faith is the use of reason. Robert Barnard, whose mordantly funny one-off mysteries are as good as any currently being produced, has tended to sag in the too cute series featuring Perry Trethowan, a highborn cop. In Cherry Blossom Corpse...
...contrast, Cuomo offered as the patron of his party's principles the man G.K. Chesterton called "the world's one quite sincere democrat," St. Francis of Assisi. The wealthy 13th century Italian, a man-about-town who was "born again" and founded the Franciscan order, is a Cuomo favorite. The Governor suggested that if St. Francis were alive today, his ascetic devotion to the poor, sick and oppressed might have led him to progressive politics and the ideals of the Democratic Party. Though Republicans may jeer at Cuomo's sudden secularization of a saint and dismiss...
Victorian writers, observed G.K. Chesterton, "were lame giants; the strongest of them walked on one leg a little shorter than the other." That remark has been amplified by Phyllis Rose in her lively study of five 19th century couples. The title, Parallel Lives, has two meanings: the disparate views of marriage held by husband and wife, and the juxtaposition of twittering romantic expectations and tragic neuroses. Reading Rose's work is like turning a valentine to find graffiti underneath: not a pleasant experience, but a compelling one. The couples could not have been better chosen. Each contains one famous...