Classic Mystery Collection - Illustrated - Crime, Suspense, Detective fiction. (100+ works) including The Complete Collection of Sherlock Holmes, ... Agatha Christie, Sax Rohmer & more (mobi), page 5
Incisive comments and observations occurred almost impulsively in Chesterton's writing. In the middle of his epic poem The Ballad of the White Horse he famously states:
For the great Gaels of Ireland
Are the men that God made mad,
For all their wars are merry,
And all their songs are sad.
The Chesterbelloc
Chesterton is often associated with his close friend, the poet and essayist Hilaire Belloc. Shaw coined the name Chesterbelloc for their partnership, and this stuck. Though they were very different men, they shared many beliefs; Chesterton eventually joined Belloc in his natal Catholicism, and both voiced criticisms towards capitalism and socialism. They instead espoused a third way: distributism.
G. K.'s Weekly, which occupied much of Chesterton's energy in the last 15 years of his life, was the successor to Belloc's New Witness, taken over from Cecil Chesterton, Gilbert's brother who died in World War I.
Both Chesterton and Belloc have faced accusations of anti-Semitism during their lifetimes and subsequently. Their criticisms of the "international Jewish banking families" are some of the most important reasons for these accusations. For example, G.K., Belloc, and G.K.'s brother Cecil were vehement critics of the Isaacs, who were involved in the Marconi scandal in the years before World War I. George Orwell accused Chesterton of being guilty of "endless tirades against Jews, which he thrust into stories and essays upon the flimsiest pretexts."
In The New Jerusalem, Chesterton made it clear that he believed that there was a "Jewish Problem" in Europe, in the sense that he believed that Jewish culture (not Jewish ethnicity/Semitism) separated itself from the nationalities of Europe. He suggested the formation of a Jewish homeland as a solution, and was later invited to Palestine by Jewish Zionists who saw him as an ally in their cause. In 1934, after the Nazi Party took power in Germany he wrote that:
"In our early days Hilaire Belloc and myself were accused of being uncompromising Anti-Semites. Today, although I still think there is a Jewish problem, I am appalled by the Hitlerite atrocities. They have absolutely no reason or logic behind them. It is quite obviously the expedient of a man who has been driven to seeking a scapegoat, and has found with relief the most famous scapegoat in European history, the Jewish people."
The Wiener Library (London's archive on anti-semitism and Holocaust history) has defended Chesterton against the charge of anti-Semitism: "he was not an enemy, and when the real testing time came along he showed what side he was on."
Chesterton condemned the Nuremberg Laws, and he died in 1936, as the Hitlerite antisemitic measures were temporarily decreased due to the Berlin Olympics, long before lethal persecution by the Nazis would start.
List of major works
Charles Dickens (1903)
The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904) text
Heretics (1905)
The Man Who Was Thursday (1907) text
Orthodoxy (1908)
The Ballad Of The White Horse (1911) poetry
Father Brown short stories (detective fiction)
The Everlasting Man (1925)
Influence
Chesterton's The Everlasting Man contributed to C. S. Lewis's conversion to Christianity. In a letter to Sheldon Vanauken (December 14, 1950) Lewis calls the book "the best popular apologetic I know", and to Rhonda Bodle he wrote (December 31, 1947) "the [very] best popular defence of the full Christian position I know is G. K. Chesterton The Everlasting Man." The book was also cited in a list of 10 books that "most shaped his vocational attitude and philosophy of life".
Chesterton's biography of Charles Dickens was largely responsible for creating a popular revival for Dickens's work as well as a serious reconsideration of Dickens by scholars. Considered by T. S. Eliot, Peter Ackroyd, and others, to be the best book on Dickens ever written.
Chesterton's writings have been praised by such authors as Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, Frederick Buechner, Evelyn Waugh, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Karel Capek, David Dark, Paul Claudel, Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, Andrew Greeley, Sigrid Undset, Ronald Knox, Kingsley Amis, W. H. Auden, Anthony Burgess, E. F. Schumacher, Orson Welles, Dorothy Day and Franz Kafka.
Chesterton's Orthodoxy is considered a religious classic by many. Philip Yancey said that if he were "stranded on a desert island.. and could choose only one book apart from the Bible, I may well select Chesterton's own spiritual autobiography, Orthodoxy."
Chesterton's novel The Man Who Was Thursday inspired the Irish Republican military leader Michael Collins with the idea: 'if you didn't seem to be hiding nobody hunted you out.'
His physical appearance and apparently some of his mannerisms were a direct inspiration for the character of Dr. Gideon Fell, a well-known fictional detective created in the early 1930s by the Anglo-American mystery writer John Dickson Carr.
The author Neil Gaiman has stated that The Napoleon of Notting Hill was an important influence on his own book Neverwhere. Gaiman also based the character Gilbert, from the comic book The Sandman, on Chesterton, as well as featuring a quotation from "The Man who was October", a book Chesterton wrote "only in dreams", at the end of Season of Mists. Gaiman's novel Good Omens, co-authored with Terry Pratchett is dedicated "to the memory of G.K. Chesterton: A man who knew what was going on."
Ingmar Bergman considered Chesterton's little known play Magic to be one of his favourites and even staged a production in Swedish. Later he reworked Magic into his movie The Magician in 1958.
The Third Way (UK) campaigns for the widespread ownership of property are inspired by the economic system Chesterton espoused: Distributism.
The Innocence of Father Brown is cited by Guillermo Martinez as one of the inspirations for his thriller The Oxford Murders. Martinez explicitly quotes from Chesterton's story in Chapter 25 of The Oxford Murders.
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Robert Erskine Childers
Early life | Military career | Home Rule | Civil War and death
Robert Erskine Childers DSO (25 June 1870-24 November 1922) was an author and Irish nationalist who was executed by the authorities of the newly independent Irish Free State during the Irish Civil War. He was the son of British Orientalist scholar Robert Caesar Childers; the cousin of Hugh Childers and Robert Barton; and the father of the fourth President of Ireland, Erskine Hamilton Childers.
Early life
Childers was born in London to a Protestant family originally from Glendalough, Ireland. His father was English and his mother Irish, but he was orphaned as a child and raised by an uncle in County Wicklow.
He was sent to Haileybury College and then studied at Trinity College, Cambridge and after graduation took a job in 1895 as a clerk in the House of Commons. He was an enthusiastic yachtsman, owning several boats during his life and sailing them regularly. At this point in his career he was a supporter of the British Empire.
Military career
On the outbreak of the Second Boer War in 1899 he volunteered for action, serving as an officer in the City Imperial Volunteers, while he was part of the Honourable Artillery Company in the British Army. He was wounded in South Africa and invalided back to Britain. On his return he wrote the novel The Riddle of the Sands which was published in 1903. Based on his own sailing trips along the German coast, it predicted war with Germany and called for British preparedness. Widely popular, the book has never gone out of print.
It has been called the first spy novel (a claim challenged by advocates of Rudyard Kipling's Kim, published two years earlier), and enjoyed immense popularity in the years before World War I. It was an extremely influential book: Winston Churchill later credited it as a major reason that the Admiralty decided to establish naval bases at Invergordon, Rosyth on the Firth of Forth and Scapa Flow in Orkney.
In 1903, Childers visited the United States. There he met and married Mollie Osgood, who shared his love of sailing. The two received a small sailing yacht, the Asgard, as a wedding gift.
He wrote Volume V of the Times' History of the War in South Africa (1907), which drew attention to British errors in that war and praised the tactics of the Boer guerrillas. He also wrote two books on cavalry warfare based on his experiences, War and the Arme Blanche (1910) and the German Influence on British Cavalry (1911). Both books were strongly critical of the British Army.
Home Rule
Around this time Childers became increasingly attracted to Irish Nationalism and became an advocate of Home Rule. He resigned his post at the House of Commons in 1910 in order to campaign for this cause, writing The Form and Purpose of Home Rule in 1912. In July 1914 he and his wife even smuggled German arms to Howth, County Dublin, in their yacht Asgard, days before the outbreak of World War I. These weapons would later arm the Irish Volunteers during the Easter Rising of 1916. This had been organised in response to the Larne gunrunning of the Ulster Volunteer Force. The remainder of the consignment of guns purchased in Germany for the Irish Volunteers was landed a week later at Kilcoole, county Wicklow by Sir Thomas Myles from his own yacht, the Chotah.
With the start of war, Childers joined the Royal Navy as an Intelligence Officer and was active in the North Sea and the Dardanelles. He was awarded the DSO and promoted to Lieutenant Commander in 1916.
However the violent suppression of the Easter Rising had angered Childers, and after the war he moved to Dublin to become fully involved in the struggle against British rule. He joined Sinn Féin, forming a close association with Éamon de Valera and Michael Collins.
In 1919 he was made Director of Publicity for the First Irish Parliament and represented the Irish nationalists at the Versailles conference in Paris. In 1920 Childers published Military Rule in Ireland, a strong attack on British policy. In 1921 he was elected (unopposed) to the Dáil as member for Wicklow and published the pamphlet Is Ireland a Danger to England?, which attacked the British prime minister, David Lloyd George. He became editor of the Irish Bulletin after the arrest of Desmond FitzGerald.
Civil War and death
Childers was secretary-general of the Irish delegation that negotiated the Anglo-Irish Treaty with the British government. He stayed at the delegation headquarters in Hans Place throughout the period of the negotiations, 11 October-6 December 1921. Childers became vehemently opposed to the final draft of the agreement, particularly the clauses that required Irish leaders to take an Oath of Allegiance to the British king. The Treaty bitterly divided Sinn Féin and the IRA, and Ireland slipped into civil war. Soon Childers was regarded as a traitor not only by the British, but by the pro-Treaty Free State government in Dublin, which was under increasing pressure from Winston Churchill and the British government to take violent reprisal measures against the anti-treaty forces and their leaders.
Said to be the inspiration behind the irregulars' propaganda, Childers was hunted by Free State soldiers and had to travel secretly. The ambush death of Michael Collins intensified the desire of Free State authorities to exact retribution, and in September 1922 the Irish Dáil introduced the Emergency Powers legislation, establishing martial law powers and new capital offences for the carrying of firearms. In November of the same year, Childers was arrested by Free State forces at his home, Glendalough, in County Wicklow, while travelling to meet De Valera. He was tried by a military court on the pretext of possessing a small-calibre automatic pistol on his person in violation of the Emergency Powers Resolution. Ironically, the pistol was alleged to be a gift from Michael Collins before the latter swore allegiance to the Free State. Childers was convicted by the military court and sentenced to death. While his appeal of the sentence was still pending, Childers was executed by firing squad at the Beggar's Bush Barracks in Dublin. He is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery.
Before his execution, in a spirit of reconciliation, Childers obtained a promise from his then 16-year-old son, the future President Erskine Hamilton Childers, to seek out and shake the hand of every man who had signed his father's death warrant. Childers himself shook hands with each member of the firing squad that was about to execute him. His last words, spoken to them, were (characteristically) in the nature of a joke: "Take a step or two forward, lads. It will be easier that way."
Winston Churchill, who had actively pressured Michael Collins and the Free State government to crush the rebellion by armed force, expressed the British view of Childers at the time: "No man has done more harm or done more genuine malice or endeavoured to bring a greater curse upon the common people of Ireland than this strange being, actuated by a deadly and malignant hatred for the land of his birth." In Ireland, however, many saw Childers's execution as politically-motivated revenge, an expedient method of halting the continuing flow of anti-British political texts for which Childers was widely acknowledged.
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Agatha Christie
Biography | Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple | In popular culture | List of works | Novels | Collections of Short Stories | Novels written as Mary Westmacott | Plays | Radio Plays | Television Plays | Nonfiction | Other published works | Co-authored works
Agatha Mary Clarissa, Lady Mallowan, DBE (15 September 1890 - 12 January 1976), mainly known as Agatha Christie, was an English crime fiction writer. She also wrote romance novels under the name Mary Westmacott, but is best remembered for her 80 detective novels and her successful West End theatre plays. Her works, particularly featuring detectives Hercule Poirot or Miss Jane Marple, have given her the title the 'Queen of Crime' and made her one of the most important and innovative writers in the development of the genre.
Christie has been called - by the Guinness Book of World Records, among others - the best-selling writer of books of all time, and the best-selling writer of any kind second only to William Shakespeare. An estimated one billion copies of her novels have been sold in English, and another billion in 103 other languages. As an example of her broad appeal, she is the all-time best-selling author in France, with over 40 million copies sold in French (as of 2003) versus 22 million for Emile Zola, the nearest contender.
Her stage play, The Mousetrap, holds the record for the longest run ever in London, opening at the Ambassadors Theatre on 25 November 1952, and as of 2007 is still running after more than 20,000 performances. In 1955, Christie was the first recipient of the Mystery Writers of America's highest honor, the Grand Master Award, and in the same year, Witness for the Prosecution was given an Edgar Award by the MWA, for Best Play. Most of her books and short stories have been filmed, some many times over (Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile, 4.50 From Paddington), and many have been adapted for television, radio, video games and comics.
In 1998, the control of the rights to most of the literary works of Agatha Christie passed to the company Chorion, when it purchased a majority 64% share in Agatha Christie Limited.
Biography
Agatha Christie was born as Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller in Torquay, Devon, to an American father and an English mother. She never held or claimed United States citizenship. Her father was Frederick Miller, a rich American stockbroker, and her mother was Clara Boehmer, a British aristocrat. Christie had a sister, Margaret Frary Miller (1879-1950), called Madge, eleven years her senior, and a brother, Louis Montant Miller (1880-1929), called Monty, ten years older than Christie. Her father died when she was very young. Her mother resorted to teaching her at home, encouraging her to write at a very young age. At the age of 16 she went to a school in Paris to study singing and piano.
Her first marriage, an unhappy one, was in 1914 to Colonel Archibald Christie, an aviator in the Royal Flying Corps. The couple had one daughter, Rosalind Hicks, and divorced in 1928.
During World War I she worked at a hospital and then a pharmacy, a job that influenced her work; many of the murders in her books are carried out with poison. (See also cyanide, ricin, and thallium.)
On 8 December 1926, while living in Sunningdale in Berkshire, she disappeared for ten days, causing great interest in the press. Her car was found in a chalk pit in Newland's Corner, Surrey. She was eventually found staying at the Swan Hydro (now the Old Swan hotel) in Harrogate under the name of the woman with whom her husband had recently admitted to having an affair. She claimed to have suffered a nervous breakdown and a fugue state caused by the death of her mother and her husband's infidelity. Opinions are still divided as to whether this was a publicity stunt. Public sentiment at the time was negative, with many feeling that an alleged publicity stunt had cost the taxpayers a substantial amount of money. A 1979 film, Agatha, starring Vanessa Redgrave as Christie, recounted a fictionalised version of the disappearance. Other media accounts of this event exist; it was featured on a segment of Paul Harvey's The Rest of the Story, for example.
In 1930, Christie married a Roman Catholic (despite her divorce and her Anglican faith), the archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan. Mallowan was 14 years younger than Christie, and his travels with her contributed background to several of her novels set in the Middle East. Their marriage was happy in the early years, and endured despite Mallowan's many affairs in later life, notably with Barbara Parker, whom he married in 1977, the year after Christie's death. Other novels (such as And Then There Were None) were set in and around Torquay, Devon, where she was born. Christie's 1934 novel, Murder on the Orient Express was written in the Pera Palas hotel in Istanbul, Turkey, the southern terminus of the railroad. The hotel maintains Christie's room as a memorial to the author. The Greenway Estate in Devon, acquired by the couple as a summer residence in 1938, is now in the care of the National Trust. Christie often stayed at Abney Hall in Cheshire, which was owned by her brother-in-law, James Watts. She based at least two of her stories on the hall: The short story The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding which is in the story collection of the same name and the novel After the Funeral. "Abney became Agatha's greatest inspiration for country-house life, with all the servants and grandeur which have been woven into her plots. The descriptions of the fictional Styles, Chimneys, Stoneygates and the other houses in her stories are mostly Abney in various forms."
