LIVERPOOL DAILY POST:
“Mr Ronald Firbank has always had his own manner, and a very modish one. In Santal the elegance, almost dandyism, of his style has given just a faint hint of flippancy to a tale in itself very dignified, and full of an unexpected warmth and delicacy of feeling. It is a nouvelle—who could call a thing of such distinction a long short story?—with the vivid richly-coloured background of the East.... Something there is, too, of irony and detachment, as though the Mr Firbank of Valmouth and of The Princess Zoubaroff were secretly smiling a little cynically at his unexpected tumble into sentiment.”
SOUTHPORT GUARDIAN:
“The incense of Santal pervades the book throughout. Mr Firbank is a discriminating artist; he has an exotic sense of words and of colour. Seldom have we met in so short a space so intense a characterisation of pilgrimage or so vivid a picture of the Algerian scene.”
TIMES:
“Mr Firbank here drops his artificiality and gives a vividly real study of an Eastern city ... a vivid glimpse of a world strange—to a European—but convincingly true.”
IN PREPARATION
A STUDY OF WEST INDIAN LIFE AND MANNERS
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The name by which the future saint was sometimes called among her friends.
[2] Always a humiliating recollection with her in after years. Vide: ‘Confessions.’