The Reactionary

Atlantic Magazine | March 2012
By Christopher Hitchens

PROFESSOR KER’S SPIRITED and double-barreled attempt at a rehabilitation of his cherished subject is enjoyable in its own right, and takes in such matters as Chesterton’s dialectical genius for paradox, the authority of the Father Brown stories in the detective genre, and the salience of Charles Dickens in the English canonical one. But for him to show that his hero was the protagonist of a superior form of English democratic virtue, Ker would have to meet me where we are at agreement: on the high quality of Chesterton’s poems.

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The story behind Christopher Hitchens’s March 2012 essay here.
By Benjamin Schwarch, The Atlantic’s literary and national editor.