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    The Critic Magazine

    Sincerely ducking the hard questions

    May 27, 2021 4 minutes
    Nick Cohen

    G.K. CHESTERTON DEFINED THE “good bad book” in 1905 as cracking stories with no pretensions that survive long after readers have forgotten the serious literary fiction of the day. The Sherlock Holmes stories were an example George Orwell cited when he ran with Chesterton’s idea in the 1940s, and you might quote them today.

    In our vicious and gullible times, we have “false true books”: propaganda works that are deceitful to the point of worthlessness, but reflect a truth about the world because millions believe their ideas and act on them. What Chesterton said of fiction applies to political writing: “The more dishonest a book is as a book the more

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