LOOKING BACK AT BRITAIN

Southland Times, Issue 22074, 22 July 1933, Page 11

LOOKING BACK AT BRITAIN

In writing “The Briton at Home,” T. C. List has no constructive plan. The book, as a matter of fact, is a collection of newspaper articles in which the author revealed his impressions of a trip to the Old Country in connection with the Imperial Press Conference of 1930, and they are, what the author knows them to be —journalism. When this term is used by book reviewers it generally carries with it some suggestion of derogation, as if journalism were thu last stages of literary corruption: but that valuation of the word is a survival of the glorious old days "when journalism was stiff with jargon. Nowadays the journalist worthy of his job writes good easy English, and leaves the pompous phrases to those professors who sneer at newspapers. I recall one Professor of English at Canterbury College who went into a newspaper office to write a ten-line paragraph about a little society of which he was a member. He used up dozens of slips of copy paper and after three-quarters of an hour, evolved a paragraph that would have shamed a cub reporter of two days’ standing. Mr List was fortunate in seeing so many of the prominent men of the Old Country at close range, and the section devoted to his excellent sketches of them is, I think, the most valuable part of his book. It is instructive to see these men at close quarters so that we may be reminded that, brilliant though they be, they are still men. But I found the discriptive articles extraordinarily interesting. London has been written over by millions of pens; but Mr List has managed io recover many interesting facts that have been overlooked by other writers, and as a result these articles have an invigorating freshness about them, a valuable asset: quite apart from the shrewdness of the author’s observations. New Zealanders should read the article on “The Art of Living.” Mr List travelled through England and into Scotland, so that the scope of his impressions goes beyond London. His interests were varied, and so we find him writing on the country of the great literary figures of the past, on Tintern Abbey, on British industries, some of the great public schools, the Bamardo Homes and Old Plymouth. These are the random recollections of a traveller who has kept his eyes open, and as they are told in English that is easy to read, “The Briton at Home” makes an enjoyable as well as an instructive book. "The Briton at Home,” by T. C. List (Taranaki Daily News, New Plymouth, 2nd edition).