G.K. Chesterton 2013. The Man Who Was Thursday. A nightmare. Melbourne: Penguin Books. First published 1908. 180 pp.

People have devoted effort to decoding philosophical issues from this, but it seems mainly an amusement, a mixture of satire and comedy, and at the expense of police forces, of authority in general, and anarchists. But it is also another reminder that neither satire nor comedy lasts well; the social context that makes it work is gone. To set matters straight, Penguin have appended a couple of pages extracted by an article by G.K. Chesterton, published the day before he died, in which the importance of the subtitle is emphasised. It is a nightmare.