Daring? No. Well written? Yes

This has all the appearance of a book invented by a publisher. Two years ago W. Sydney Robinson published an excellent biography of the Victorian newspaperman W.T. Stead. How best to follow this? No attractive subject for another full-scale biography suggested itself. Why not therefore fill in time by writing long essays on four worthies from the generation that followed Stead? And so we have: ‘A Daring Reassessment of Four Twentieth Century Eccentrics: Sir William Joynson-Hicks, Dean Inge, Lord Reith and Sir Arthur Bryant.’ The only trouble is that the reassessment is not particularly daring and the characters hardly at all eccentric.

Joynson-Hicks — ‘Jix’ as he was usually referred to, and Lord Brentford as he eventually became — was bizarre rather than eccentric. All Robinson’s heroes were conservative with a small ‘c’ and usually with a large ‘C’ as well, but Jix was so far to the right that Robinson feels it necessary to protest that he would ‘likely have found Nazism as abhorrent and unchristian as he found Communism’.