THERE are many reasons for admiring and reading G. K. Chesterton: his wit, his wisdom, his mastery of paradox, his prophetic critique of so many of the absurdities thrown up by mere materialism and by the solipsism of so much modern thought.

But, for me, it is Chesterton’s ability to surprise us with the familiar, to take what we take for granted and show it to us again as something suddenly, startlingly new, that makes him such a vital writer. He can do it with little things, like a piece of chalk or the contents of his own pockets; but he can also do it on a grander scale. So, for example, on 6 July 1907, he wrote in The Daily News (one of his many columns): “Somewhere in the seas of sunset or of sunrise, somewhere in the ultimate archipelago of the earth, there is one little island which I wish to find: an island with low green hills, and great white cliffs. Travellers tell me that it is called England. . .”

Literary critics take T. S. Eliot far more seriously than Chesterton; but here is Chesterton showing us, not telling us, what Eliot, rather laboriously, tells us 20 years later:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

In this instance, Eliot gives us the instructions, but Chesterton has already given us the experience.

In the company of writers such as Chesterton, and under the stimulus of my own imagination, I am constantly discovering, or rediscovering, “the ultimate archipelago of the earth”, the mysterious “island of low green hills and great white cliffs”.

Chesterton’s perspective here is entirely right. For all the long centuries of the great classical civilisations of Greece and Rome, civilisations which have been so formative for us, we have enjoyed the poetic privilege of being literally the ends of the earth: a far flung place, ultima Thule, so distant and mysterious, so much a terra incognita, that legends of giants and druids, of wizards who could move standing stones at a whim and elven folk who could pass at will from their own brightly coloured realm to our green and pleasant land, naturally clustered around us and inhabited our mists and our memories.

If I sometimes imagine myself as having voyaged, on some epic quest, to this mysterious land, and set foot on it for the first time, I am aided in that happy supposal by the fact that I do often leave England, and every longed-for return is, in some sense, a rediscovery. I discover, again, that this is, after all, the “one little island which I wish to find”. After the concrete canyons of Chicago, or the traffic-choked “freeways” of Los Angeles, I return to my walks in Sadlers Wood, or to the reed-fringed wilds of the north Norfolk coast, and feel that I am, in Eliot’s words, knowing the place for the first time.