Gk chesterton

Wednesday

Sam Leith

What does it mean when Giorgia Meloni quotes G.K. Chesterton?

From our UK edition

For a UK audience, the most striking moment in the new Italian PM Giorgia Meloni’s victory speech will have been that she anchored its peroration to a quote from G.K. Chesterton. ‘Chesterton wrote, more than a century ago,’ she said, ‘“Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer.” That time has arrived. We are ready.’ G.K. Chesterton? The creator of the excellently herbivorous Father Brown mysteries, the Isaac Newton of what we now call ‘cosy crime’? That G.K. Chesterton? The author of a poem, memorised by many a previous generation of English schoolboys, about how ‘the rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road’? That one?

Sunday

Casey Chalk

The left comes for the parents’ rights movement

Surveying the effect of British education on families, G.K. Chesterton wryly observed in his 1910 book What’s Wrong with the World: “The only persons who seem to have nothing to do with the education of the children are the parents.” Little more than a decade later, the compulsory public education movement was to pick up steam across the United States, often presented as a necessity for the protection and wellbeing of American children. History, Mark Twain might say, is rhyming.

loudoun