Untitled

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLIII, Issue 20675, 13 March 1937, Page 11 (Supplement)

Reading G. K. Chesterton’s autobiography, J. B. Priestley has come to the conclusion that, compared with their rollicking elders, present-day writers are a gloomy group. Mr Priestley feels that Chesterton, Belloc, Wells, Baring, and others enjoyed higher spirits and higher jinks than he and his contemporaries do. He cannot imagine T. S. Eliot, Richard Aldington, and Ivor Brown up to such larks.

What will probably be the biggest book in the world is now being written in Johannesburg, South Africa. By the time it is completed it is expected that it will contain 1.000.000 entries. The book’s title, ‘The Golden Register of Visitors to the Empire Exhibition Held in 1936-37 in Honour of Johannesburg's Jubilee.’ is inscribed on a plate of real gold extracted from the Witwatersrand mines.

In somewhat dramatic circumstances a fragment of carbonised bone from Shelley's funeral pyre was discovered recently in Rome. For some years the key of a drawer in a steel safe in the Keats-Shelley Memorial has been lost, and when, In the presence of the authorities, the steel drawer was forced by a locksmith two cardboard boxes were brought to view. One of the boxes contained the gold pen which King Victor Emmanuel of Italy used when he inscribed his name at the opening ceremony of the memorial in 1909. Tire other box contained the bathetic relic of Percy Bysshe Shelley. The presumption is that this fragment of bona formed part of the ashes which had been presented to the memorial by a descendant of Leigh Hunt. Leigh Hunt, together with Lord Byron. Trelawny, and Captain Shenley, was present when the body of Shelley was burnt, so that it is probable that the fragment now in the Keats-Shelley Memorial forms part of a handful of ashes taken by Leigh Hunt himself.