ABSTRACT
“A real kindness and sympathy, never quite hidden even when he was most intolerant, gave charm to everything he said. The flow of quaint imagery showed a quick receptive mind: the love of old fixed certainties a shrinking from the unknown future.” 1 This is how the English writer Gilbert Keith Chesterton is described in an interview published in 1919. The interviewer was not the first to discover Chesterton’s warmth and generosity – nor his polemic. And it was precisely the combination of warmth and polemic that was typical of Chesterton. In his book Heretics (1905), he writes polemically against many of the intellectual elite of the period, including George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, and Bertrand Russell; at the same time, most of them remained his friends, and they would certainly have protested vigorously if anyone had described him as “intolerant”. Chesterton as well as his adversaries saw their debates as honest and fair fights, something that was absolutely necessary when important issues were at stake. They all took the same delight in their incessant crossing of swords, and they preferred a fair fight to being knocked senseless with intellectual sandbags.
