I should not have been surprised that Chesterton was not to be found in Samuel Beckett’s library. Perhaps I expected to find a trenchant remark. Chesterton belonged to an entirely different literary constellation; there was not even an interesting friction as sparked between Chesterton and Shaw. Perhaps only a shared fascination with the comic as a mode of seriousness.

Where Beckett and Chesterton would have shared a worthwhile conversation over a bottle of Burgundy is their devotional attachment to Samuel Johnson. But even there, Beckett was drawn to the Johnson of Prayers and Meditations, the man terrified of madness, of sloth, of damnation; the man who touched every post walking down the street and went back to touch the ones he had missed. Chesterton loved Johnson as the embodiment of roaring common sense, the man who kicks a stone and says “I refute it thus.” They read the same writer and find entirely different people, which tells you almost everything about the distance between them.

De Quincey sits between the two as a kind of hinge: Chesterton ought to have loved him, since they share the digressive essay and the delight in paradox, but De Quincey’s prose turns inward toward dream and hallucination, and Chesterton distrusted interiority of that kind. Beckett inherits that inwardness and radicalises it.

Somehow I find I am drawn to all four writers equally.