BY THE SAME AUTHOR
SMALL TALK AT WREYLAND
FIRST SERIES
Demy 8vo. Illustrated. 8s. net.
“Mr Torr chats to us. We feel that we have been invited to Wreyland and are sitting with him over the fire while he turns through his grandfather’s and his father’s letters and reads us little extracts, and lets his talk wander as it will from suggestion to suggestion.... A quaint ingenuity and originality of idea plays about it all: a sly wit flashes here and there. But always, behind everything, we feel Wreyland, the Devon home, the rooted life. We should like to give some examples; but choosing them is as difficult as choosing raspberries when all are ripe; for, in the classic phrase of the reviewer, there is not a dull page in Mr Torr’s book. We confess to skipping a single paragraph. On turning back to read it we found that we had missed a fragrant bit of social history.... As to good stories, open any page that you will and you will find one.... The only point of capping a good talker’s stories is to egg him on to tell more. We hope that Mr Torr will take the hint.”—Times Literary Supplement.
“He has travelled far afield in Europe, and he comes back to Wreyland and dips into his grandfather’s and his father’s letters, and his own memory as well, and tells us what he thinks of things that were and are. And what we like is the easy balance of his mind. The old times were not always the good times, and modern days are not altogether bad; so Mr Torr has taken each as it has come, and has been content therewith.”—Morning Post.
“Wreyland is Mr Torr’s home near Dartmoor, and his book gives us a sort of comic mirror of life at Wreyland during his own life and the life of his grandfather. For Mr Torr sees life comically as surely as Jane Austen herself.... It would be difficult, indeed, to define the reasons of its astonishing attractiveness. Probably one of them is that Mr Torr was born with a genius for enjoyment, and that he somehow infects us with his happiness in his most trivial pages.”—Daily News.
“This short book is worth a dozen of the silly volumes that now flood the book-market. It preserves country lore of the sort that is fast decaying, mingled with travel notes, a few details of scholarship and family history. The ordinary local historian is industrious, but wanting in other ways. Mr Torr is a scholar: he has, too, an excellent sense of humour, an inquiring mind and an observant eye.”—Saturday Review.
“A man who takes a keen interest in his ancestral place and in his humble neighbours, and who at the same time is in touch with the world of scholarship through his special studies, may be said to make the most of life.... Mr Torr, like a true scholar, wastes no words. The essence of the ordinary book of memoirs, as he knows, is in the anecdotes. He therefore gives the anecdotes without the usual framework, telling them neatly and briefly, and passing from one subject to another without even a chapter-heading to break the flow of good talk.”—Spectator.