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Tremendous Trifles by Gilbert K. Chesterton (1909). Summary : Tremendous trifles -- A piece of chalk -- The secret of a train -- The perfect game -- The extraordinary cabman -- An accident -- The advantages of having one leg -- The end of the world -- In the Place de La Bastille -- On lying in bed -- The twelve men -- The wind and the trees -- The Dickensian -- In topsy-turvy land -- What I found in my pocket -- The dragon's grandmother -- The red angel -- The tower -- How I met the president -- The giant -- A great man -- The orthodox barber -- The toy theatre -- A tragedy of twopence -- A cab ride across country -- The two noises -- Some policemen and a moral -- The lion -- Humanity: an interlude -- The little birds who won't sing -- The riddle of the ivy -- The travellers in state -- The prehistoric railway station -- The diabolist -- A glimpse of my country -- A somewhat improbable story -- The shop of ghosts -- The ballade of a strange town -- The mystery of a pageant. These fleeting sketches are all republished by kind permission of the Editor of the DAILY NEWS, in which paper they appeared. They amount to no more than a sort of sporadic diary—a diary recording one day in twenty which happened to stick in the fancy—the only kind of diary the author has ever been able to keep. Even that diary he could only keep by keeping it in public, for bread and cheese. But trivial as are the topics they are not utterly without a connecting thread of motive. As the reader's eye strays, with hearty relief, from these pages, it probably alights on something, a bed-post or a lamp-post, a window blind or a wall. It is a thousand to one that the reader is looking at something that he has never seen: that is, never realised. Author Gilbert Keith Chesterton (29 May 1874 – 14 June 1936), better known as G. K. Chesterton, was an English writer, poet, philosopher, dramatist, journalist, orator, lay theologian, biographer, and literary and art critic. Chesterton is often referred to as the "prince of paradox". Time magazine has observed of his writing style: "Whenever possible Chesterton made his points with popular sayings, proverbs, allegories—first carefully turning them inside out." Chesterton is well known for his fictional priest-detective Father Brown, and for his reasoned apologetics. Even some of those who disagree with him have recognised the wide appeal of such works as Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man. Chesterton routinely referred to himself as an "orthodox" Christian, and came to identify this position more and more with Catholicism, eventually converting to Catholicism from High Church Anglicanism. George Bernard Shaw, his "friendly enemy", said of him, "He was a man of colossal genius."Biographers have identified him as a successor to such Victorian authors as Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, Cardinal John Henry Newman, and John Ruskin. Chesterton wrote around 80 books, several hundred poems, some 200 short stories, 4000 essays, and several plays. He was a literary and social critic, historian, playwright, novelist, Catholic theologian and apologist, debater, and mystery writer. He was a columnist for the Daily News, The Illustrated London News, and his own paper, G. K.'s Weekly; he also wrote articles for the Encyclopædia Britannica, including the entry on Charles Dickens and part of the entry on Humour in the 14th edition (1929). His best-known character is the priest-detective Father Brown, who appeared only in short stories, while The Man Who Was Thursday is arguably his best-known novel.

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