The Transatlantic Disputations: Essays and Meditations

Book excerpt: These are some of the collected essays and musings of Gervase Wemyss, chronicler of the fall of Chamberlain and the ascension of Churchill in May 1940, and Markham Pyle, historian of how Congress, by one vote and mostly by accident, kept the draft in 1941 - four months before Pearl Harbor. Mr Pyle and Mr Wemyss are also the editors of the annotated editions of Kipling and Kenneth Grahame, and the partners in Bapton Books. In this volume, they meditate on trout streams, toaster-ovens, battlefields, game birds, regional culture, regional cooking, the writing of history, and the craft of writing, dispensing wise advice as they go. Setters and soldiers, fly-rods and Fragonard, rivers and reflections on writing: here are 'great riches in a little room'.