The Man Who Was Thursday

“Why does each thing on earth war against each other thing?”


GK Chesterton's 1908 masterwork The Man Who Was Thursday is an intriguing mix of thriller, farce and gothic romance, and a detective story filled with poetry and politics. 


Gabriel Syme is both a poet and a police detective. 


Lucian Gregory is both a poet and a bomb-throwing anarchist. 


Syme infiltrates a secret meeting of anarchists and becomes code named 'Thursday', one of the seven members of the Central Anarchist Council. 


He soon learns, however, that he is not the only one in disguise, and the nightmare begins.



As Simon Hammond observed in The Guardian, The Man Who Was Thursday “increasingly revels in the disorder of dreams. Chesterton's great achievement is to imbue the everyday world with wonder; everything becomes exotic and fantastical. His portrayal of London in particular is an enchanting evocation of the modern metropolis – the city is rendered as a psychedelic wonderland, as both an ocean and a mountain range, as both the depths of hell and the unexplored surface of a foreign planet.”





G.K. CHESTERTON, (1874 – 1936), was an English writer, philosopher, dramatist, journalist, biographer, and art critic. Today he is best known for his fictional priest-detective, Father Brown.