Coren's book is indispensable for helping readers better understand the private side of Chesterton.

Literary Converts is a biographical exploration into the spiritual lives of some of the greatest writers in the English language: Oscar Wilde, Evelyn Waugh, C.S. Lewis, Malcolm Muggeridge, Graham Greene, Edith Sitwell, Siegfried Sassoon, Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers, T.S. Eliot and J.R.R. Tolkien. The role of George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells in intensifying the religious debate despite not being converts themselves is also considered. Many will be intrigued to know more about what inspired their literary heroes; others will find the association of such names with Christian belief surprising or even controversial. Whatever viewpoint we may have, Literary Converts touches on some of the most important questions of the twentieth century, making it a fascinating read.

Philip Waller explores the literary world in which the modern best-seller first emerged, with writers promoted as stars and celebrities, advertising both products and themselves.

The jovial journalist, philosopher, and theologian G.K. Chesterton felt that the world was almost always in permanent danger of being misjudged or even overlooked, and so the pursuit of understanding, insight, and awareness was his perpetual preoccupation. Being sensitive to the boundaries and possibilities of perception, he believed that it really was possible, albeit in a limited way, to see things as they are. Duncan Reyburn, marrying Chesterton's unique perspective with the discipline of philosophical hermeneutics, aims to outline what Chesterton can teach us about reading, interpreting, and participating in the drama of meaning as it unfolds before us in words and in the world. Chesterton's unique interpretive approach seems to be theimplicit fascination of all Chesterton scholarship to date, and yet this book is the first to comprehensively focus on the issue. By taking Chesterton back to his philosophical roots - via his marginalia, his approach to literary criticism, his Platonist-Thomist metaphysics, and his Roman Catholic theology - Reyburn explicitly and compellingly tackles the philosophical assumptions and goals that underpin his unique posture towards reality.

The locked room mystery is one of the iconic creations of popular fiction. Michael Cook's critical study reveals how this archetypal form of the puzzle story has had a significant effect in shaping the immensely popular genre of detective fiction. The book includes analysis of texts from Poe to the present day.

An interdisciplinary study of the Impressionist/early Modernist works of Conrad and Ford, this book aims to show how the represented temporalities (whether to do with past, present, future experience within and without the novels, or logical/structural relations of ‘before’ and ‘after’) are at the core of the won effects of both authors’ oeuvres. Looking at such well-known works as Nostromo, The Good Soldier, The Fifth Queen, Parade’s End, the study makes use of philosophy (historical and contemporary), theology, psychoanalysis, and other sources, to re-describe, unlock and display the fertile ways in which time and historical experience are both manumitted within the tales analysed, and, recursively, within their reading experience. Ultimately, the two senses of ‘making you see’, from Conrad’s iconic Preface, are used as gambits to understand the ways in which these novels are metaphysically vibrant, symbolically hopeful- as against the more common interpretation of metaphysical dissolution and (over-determined) failure.

How does the preacher know what God might say now based upon the many things God said then? Preachers and theologians throughout Christian history have grappled with Scripture's diverse emphases alongside the urgent task of declaring the authoritative Word of God in the contemporary pulpit. Aaron Edwards offers a new way of engaging with this problem, by exploring the theological relationship between biblical dialectics and heraldic proclamation. Edwards highlights the theological necessity of dialectical variety, without forfeiting assertiveness in the prophetic moment of preaching. A vast array of key voices from the theological tradition are drawn upon - including Augustine, Aquinas, Eckhart, Luther, Calvin, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Chesterton, Barth, Bultmann, Tillich, Ebeling, and others - to navigate the connection between Scriptural unity, clarity, and paradoxical plurivocality, leading to a nuanced account of dialectic. Applying this to the homiletically neglected concept of 'heraldic' confidence in preaching, Edwards examines the theological possibility of preaching in light of dialectical complexity via its 'prophetic' dimension. He shows how the uniquely revelatory relationship of Word and Spirit enables Scriptural illumination, prophetic discernment, and dialectical decisiveness in the 'momentary' encounter which undergirds all Christian proclamation.