Kirjahaku

In this latest volume in Mr. Croft-Cooke's autobiographical series, he writes about the uneasy world of the 1930 and of Spain before the Civil War. On a personal level, he tells about his new venture into the second-hand book trade, when through patience and determination he managed to survive brilliantly where it would have been so easy to have failed. As a creative writer he battled through more ups and downs than would seem possible, yet always emerged triumphant, if scarred, determined to live by the profession he had chosen, no matter what the difficulties. Remembering, he writes now with charm and humour of the period and the people he knew, and he has recaptured vividly the world that surrounded a young professional writer struggling to keep his head above water.

Part of Croft-Cooke's series of autobiographical works, The Sensual World.The Author says, 'I have given this book its title because the words seem to fit each of the two journeys it records, journeys which, in the cant phrase of the courtroom, ran concurrently.The first was through the Mediterranean on a Yugoslav cargo boat during the coldest month of one of Europe's most icy winters for a century. The second was along the coastlines of some recent fiction, my choice being made for me by the booksellers in various ports on whose stocks of Penguins I relied.' The books inThe Sensual Worldseries are a beautiful record of their time. England of the twenties, thirties, and forties is brilliantly evoked, and the descriptions of his travels in Europe and Argentina capture the wonder of youth and discovery. He met many famous writers of the time, and the descriptions of his meetings with Kipling, Masefield, Chesterton, and Compton Mackenzie, among others, are full of insight and also the freshness and enthusiasm of a novice writer at the feet of his heroes. He writes with skill, lightness of touch, and humour.

This Latest Volume of Autobiography opens in 1934, in an isolated hamlet in the Cotswolds. Mr. Croft-Gooke was 30 years old. He had published six novels, was earning GBP300 a year, and considered himself 'an enviable young man'. He had a house with peacocks on the lawn. He was happy. He decided however to revisit Argen-tina, where he travelled extensively, lecturing and meeting old friends and new. When he returned to his isolated hamlet, in fog and snow, he was no longer happy, but restless and unsettled. He decided to go back to Kent, where he was born. With charm and humour, Mr. Croft-Cooke vividly recreates the places and people of his youth. As a reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement wrote: 'Social historians of the future will do well to consult Mr. Croft-Cooke's in preference to certain more pretentious and less objective memoirs of the period.'

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