[...] a man teaches a great deal by what he does not teach.

-May 12, 1905 Daily News

Fr. Ronald Knox and Orson Welles's broadcast of The War of the Worlds

Interesting anecdote concerning Fr. Ronald Knox (who, given his close friendship with GKC, it seems this blog is an appropriate place to post this):

In January 1926, for one of his regular BBC Radio programmes, our hero broadcast a simulated live report of revolution sweeping across London entitled Broadcasting from the Barricades. In addition to live reports of several people, including a government minister, being lynched, his broadcast mixed supposed band music from the Savoy Hotel with the hotel’s purported destruction by trench mortars. The Houses of Parliament and the clock tower were also said to have been flattened. Because the broadcast occurred on a snowy weekend, much of the United Kingdom was unable to get the newspapers until days later. The lack of newspapers caused a minor panic, as it was believed that this was caused by the events in London.

A 2005 BBC report on the broadcast suggests that the innovative style of our heroe’s programme may have influenced Orson Welles’s radio broadcast “The War of the Worlds” (1938), which foreshadowed it in its consequences. In an interview for the book This is Orson Welles, Welles himself said that the broadcast gave him the idea for “The War of the Worlds”! [emphasis mine] [source]

I had been aware of "Broadcasting the Barricades" before as well as the speculation that it influenced Orson Welles' broadcast, but I had been unaware until now that Welles himself stated it gave him the idea. (Of course, less than two months before his "War of the Worlds" broadcast, Orson Welles had done a broadcast of GKC's novel The Man Who Was Thursday.)

If there is any blunder which the past made carelessly, the present will reduplicate [it] carefully. Social reform, as now understood, seems to mean turning all our most antiquated sins into a system.

-October 12, 1912, Illustrated London News