"I recur here to my personal point about the tendency to miss what the title means; or even what the title says. An article like this is called subjective because it has no subject. In a rambling column, whether because it is personal or impersonal, it is permissible to introduce personal trifles about oneself, as well as about other people, so long as it is made sufficiently obvious that they are trifling. And I may remark in this connexion, or disconnexion, that I happen to have a very strong objection to that trick of missing the point of a story, or sometimes even the obvious sense of the very name of a story. I have sometimes had occasion to murmur meekly that those who endure the heavy labour of reading a book might possibly endure that of reading the title-page of a book. For there are more examples than may be imagined, in which earnest critics might solve many of their problems about what a book is, merely by discovering what it professes to be. … It is odd that one example occurred in my own case... in a book called The Man Who was Thursday."
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G. K. Chesterton, in "Trent's Last Case—Again" a review of Trent's Own Case, in Illustrated London News (13 June 1936)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edmund_Clerihew_Bentley
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Edmund Clerihew Bentley
Edmund Clerihew Bentley (July 10, 1875 – March 30, 1956) was a popular English novelist and humorist of the early 20th century, and the inventor of the clerihew, an irregular form of humorous verse on biographical topics.
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