e official writes, "if I insist on speaking to you personally.
That is how I think of our relations." G.K. was unique and they told
him so.

A lot of reading was necessary for these talks--each one dealing with
from four to ten books--and also a principle of selection. The
principle Gilbert chose for one series was historical: "Literature
lives by history. Otherwise it exists: like trigonometry." In the
fifth talk of the Autumn series of 1934, he gives a general idea of
what he has been attempting.

This is the hardest job I have had in all these wireless talks; and
I confront you in a spirit of hatred because of the toils I have
endured on your behalf; but, after all, what are my sufferings
compared to yours? Incredible as it may seem to anybody who has heard
these talks, they had originally a certain consistent plan. I dealt
first with heroic and half-legendary stories, touched upon medieval
chivalry, then on the party-heroes of Elizabethan or Puritan times;
then on the eighteenth century and then the nineteenth. In this
address I had meant to face the twentieth century; but I find it
almost faceless, largely featureless; and, anyhow, very bewildering.
I had meant to take books typical of the twentieth century as a book
on Steele is typical of the eighteenth or a book on Rossetti of the
nineteenth. And I have collected a number of most interesting
twentieth century books, claiming to declare a twentieth-century
philosophy; they really have a common quality; but I rather hesitate
to define it. Suppose I said that the main mark of the twentieth
century in ethics as in economics, is bankruptcy. I fear you might
think I was a little hostile in my criticism. Suppose I said that all
these books are marked by a brilliant futility. You might almost
fancy that I was not entirely friendly to them. You would be
mistaken. All of them are good; some of them are very good indeed.
But the question does recur; what is the good of being good in that
way? . . .

Mr. Geoffrey West's curious "Post War Credo" has one Commandment.
He does say, he does shout, we might say, he does yell, that there
must be No War . . . but he cannot impose his view because authority
has gone; and he cannot prove his view; because reason has gone. So
again it all comes back to taste. And I have enjoyed the banquet of
these excellent books; but it leaves a bad taste in my