Duncan Wu

There’s no excuse for dullness, especially when writing about a life as eventful as Joseph Johnson’s, the publisher and bookseller who worked with Mary Wollstonecraft, Joseph Priestley, William Cowper, Erasmus Darwin and Wordsworth and Coleridge, among others. I opened this book expecting it to lift the veil on dinner with Joseph Johnson, but the title’s

The Sins of G.K. Chesterton demands our attention because, as Richard Ingrams notes in his introduction, the literature on this author is (with a few notable exceptions) horribly flawed — littered with misconstruction, omissions of fact and interpretive errors designed to present him as ‘an innocent, uncomplicated man, blessed with almost permanent happiness and having