THE SKETCH

London, England

28 December 1955

(pages 672-673)

BOOKS.

SOMETHING TO READ IN THE SITTING ROOM.

by ANGELA MILNE

My friends know me as the mug who’s too lazy to sell review copies to booksellers at half-price, and piles them round the sitting-room for the folks to borrow for a nice read.

Here are two folks now, Robert and Clara . . .

“Are you looking for your own name, Robert, in that index?”

“ ‘Café Royal, Ninety Years of Bohemia,’ ”reads Clara, going round the back. (Café Royal: by Guy Deghy and Keith Waterhouse. Hutchinson; 21s.)

“Of course I wasn’t,” says Robert. “Why, am I there?”

“Frankly, no. You’d have to be a real old Bohemian getting hit with a lobster. Or Augustus John. Or Aleister Crowley. He wore a cloak he said made him invisible.”

“Did it?” asks Clara.

“No, it just frightened people, but if they didn’t speak to him he thought they hadn’t seen him. Here, let me have that book a minute, there was a wonderful story, I can’t remember about who, though, or where. This is what we reviewers call definitely a book to read sideways, or in chunks backwards. Guess who said this: “ ‘I wish you wouldn’t call me Firbank! It gives me a sense of galoshes!’ ”