20–4043
“About half the book is devoted to three charming papers on Pliny’s letters, the classics in daily life, and the Greek anthology. Other essays are on travelling companions, the art of editing, the changes and corruptions of words, and on ‘single poem poets.’”—Brooklyn
Brooklyn 12:102 Mr ’20 50w
“The essays in this second volume of literary recreations, composed in the intervals of leisure snatched from his official duties during the war, are now published for the first time, and only serve to heighten the regret caused by the premature death of their author. Reserved and restrained with strangers, he here reveals a geniality and sympathy of which only the few who knew him intimately were aware.”
+ Spec 123:659 N 15 ’19 1550w
“There will be a good many readers of this book who, after listening to Sir Edward Cook, will take down the Greek anthology or the half-forgotten Virgil or Homer from its shelf, and so thank him in the way he would have best liked to be thanked.”
+ The Times [London] Lit Sup p580 O 23 ’19 900w
COOK, W. VICTOR. Grey fish. *$2 Stokes
“In the Shetland Islands they have a toast which they drink on New Year’s day, ‘Health to man and death to the grey fish.’ In this novel both name and toast are applied to a grim sort of hunting and of prey, the German submarines off the coast of Spain during the war. The story consists of twelve connected episodes in which two of the characters are always in the centre of interest, a few others come and go, and still more appear only in single tales. The two chief actors are a young Scot ostensibly in the employ of a British firm of wine merchants with offices at various Spanish ports. The other is a middle-aged Spaniard, a stevedore, once a peasant and an ex-smuggler. A double motive urges him into the grey fish hunting, a love of dangerous adventure for its own sake and a passionate hatred of the Germans because his brother’s boat had been sunk and his brother drowned by a German submarine.”—N Y Times