![]() ![]() What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. “Fairy tales do not give a child his first idea of bogey. But the materialist’s world is quite simple and solid, just as the madman is quite sure he is sane.” ( Orthodoxy, 1908) Nay, the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman. “The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen. He made his points with wit and paradox, and in such a large body of work, there is no shortage of quotable material: It is rather as if a nurse had tried a rather bitter food for some years on a baby, and on discovering that it was not suitable, should not throw away the food and ask for a new food, but throw the baby out of window, and ask for a new baby.” Shaw asks, not for a new kind of philosophy, but for a new kind of man. Chesterton wrote of Shaw, a modernist, in Heretics (1905): “If man, as we know him, is incapable of the philosophy of progress, Mr. They rarely agreed on anything, but disagreed amicably. George Bernard Shaw was his good friend and verbal sparring partner. Lewis’s conversion from atheism to Christianity. His book The Everlasting Man (1925) contributed to C.S. He dabbled in the occult as a young man, and he and his brother tried out the Ouija board, but eventually he returned to the Church of England, and converted to Catholicism later in life his thoughts on religion influenced much of his writing. His best-known character is Father Brown, a detective-slash-priest, who features in several short stories. He considered himself primarily a journalist, and he wrote 4,000 newspaper essays he also wrote some 80 books - books of fiction, criticism, literary biography, and theology - as well as several hundred poems, about 200 short stories, and several plays. He was also remarkably prolific, writing fast and scarcely editing what he wrote. Wells and George Bernard Shaw, but he was so agreeable and full of good humor that he kept them as close friends. He disagreed sharply with many people, most notably H.G. He was a large man, well over six feet, and rotund. Chesterton, born Gilbert Keith Chesterton in London (1874). Today is the birthday of English author G.K. He skewered the comedian and his fans, saying, “This is comedy for people who have no sense of humor and who come determined to be entertained and laugh to show that they ‘get it.'” Hitchens closed his article by saying, “Hope was a fool, and nearly a clown, but he was never even remotely a comedian.”īob Hope died in 2003, two months after his 100th birthday. ![]() A few days after Hope’s death, author and journalist Christopher Hitchens called him “paralyzingly, painfully, hopelessly unfunny” in Slate. Congress unanimously passed Resolution 75 in 1997 to make him the nation’s first Honorary Veteran, and he considered this his highest achievement. It was the beginning of nearly 60 years of shows at military bases at home and abroad. In 1941, he performed his first show for soldiers, a group of airmen stationed in March Field, California. The Guinness Book of World Records named him the most honored entertainer in the world, with 2,000 awards and citations, including 54 honorary doctorates and a knighthood from his native England. He never won an Oscar for his acting - “Oscar Night at my house is called Passover,” he once quipped - but the Academy nevertheless honored him five times, with two honorary Oscars, two special awards, and a Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. His comedy was verbal, not physical, and he usually played unsympathetic characters that the audience could feel superior to. ![]() By 1940, after working in vaudeville, Broadway, and radio, he was one of America’s most popular comedians. His first successful show-biz venture came at the age of 10, when he won a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest. His family moved to the United States when he was four years old, and he grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. It’s the birthday of comedian Bob Hope (1903), born Leslie Townes Hope in Eltham, near London. ![]()
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