William Oddie > Quotes

“success as an apologist: Étienne Gilson called Orthodoxy ‘the best piece of apologetic the century [has] produced’; it brought Dorothy L. Sayers back to Christianity, just as The Everlasting Man brought C. S. Lewis to his famous moment of conversion on Headington Hill. Much remains to be done before Chesterton’s huge oeuvre can be adequately assessed as a major part of the cultural history of the last century.”
― William Oddie, Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy: The Making of GKC, 1874-1908

“in their times; we need to see more clearly than we do that the spirit of the age in which he grew to manhood had a deep effect on Chesterton’s personal and intellectual development and on the kind of writer he became: for once we have seen that, we will be able to perceive more clearly, behind the Edwardian journalist, popular versifier, and minor novelist, a more substantial and more prophetic figure, whose proper place is not with such petty luminaries as Max Beerbohm and John Galsworthy, or even with H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw,”
― William Oddie, Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy: The Making of GKC, 1874-1908

“During the second half of the nineteenth century’, wrote Gilbert’s younger brother Cecil, ‘the middle class was absolutely bubbling over with ideas…. It was rioting in its new-found intellectual liberty as heartily as the men of the Restoration rioted in their new-found moral liberty. Everywhere you found households where new theories of politics, philosophy, religion, or science were eagerly welcomed, debated, and”
― William Oddie, Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy: The Making of GKC, 1874-1908