The Defendant of the World

He was the largest man in any room, in body, in spirit, in sheer intellectual generosity, and for more than three decades he waged the most joyful, most consequential battle for the Christian mind that the twentieth century would ever see. The Defendant of the World walks beside him through every arena of that battle: the ink-stained trenches of Fleet Street, the crackling public debates with George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells, the heartbreak of the Great War, and the long, luminous pilgrimage that finally brought him into the Catholic Church. This is not a dry biography. It is a warm, reverent companion for every reader who has ever felt their faith strengthened by a Chesterton paradox or had their mind set gloriously on fire by a single blazing Chesterton sentence, and who has longed to understand the man behind the magnificent prose.