In Russia love was regarded with suspicion as a deterrent to the social obligations of the Soviet citizen. - Alec Waugh

are not a profitable form of writing; their sale is usually small but they have for the author the satisfaction of possessing reference value. They hold their place on library shelves and are consulted by the student and the traveller long after novels that enjoyed a brief bright summer are utterly forgotten, I do not suppose that it would pay a publisher to reissue today 's English in the West Indies, 's Cradle of the Deep, or 's If Crab No Walk, but those three books provide indispensable research material. It is of value to learn how certain places struck people twenty, fifty, eighty years ago.

I had reached shortly after breakfast. Letters of introduction had gone ahead of me, and within three hours I was sipping a very dry martini on the balcony of a bungalow situated on the far side of the mountain range that divides the island. A thousand feet below me 'the bright blue meadow a bay' washed in varying shades of green and turquoise against a long . Beyond it stretched an archipelago of islands, some British, some American, some a bare grazing ground for goats.

I returned to civilian life, agreeing with , that the first duty of a wine was to be red, adding my own corollary that its second duty was to be .