"Marked by technical excellence, insight, imagination, and beauty--Walpole at his best."--_San Francisco Bulletin_.
"The psychological crisis in the life of a schoolmaster, uncouth, unhappy and unloved, is keenly analyzed by the hand of a master. The hysteria that attacks the faculty of a boys’ school at examination time has never been so well described as in the moving chronicle of the ’Battle of the Umbrella’ which proves that Mr. Walpole has the crowning gift of humor."--_The Independent_.
So excellent is the versatility of Hugh Walpole that this writer of dignified and realistic and always beautiful pictures of life has among his books one with all the tension and strange plot of a Poe masterpiece--_The Prelude to Adventure_. It starts with a murder. Dune the silent, the cleverest yet laziest and most snobbish man in his class at Cambridge, has struck down a red-faced, silly, ignoble, beast of an undergraduate who has been boasting of his conquest over a poor little shopgirl. He did not mean to do murder, but there lay the man dead, where the gray Druids’ Wood dripped with rain and gray twilight.
He calmly went back to his rooms and kept silent. What happened is so filled with suspense that, very real and human though it is, the plot comes to have all the unexpectedness of the cleverest detective story. And Dune’s vision of God, as a great gray spirit standing gigantic there on the campus, waiting, waiting, is a revelation in spiritual motives. Dune’s love story, too, is fascinating--and his victory.
Suspense--color of life--love--fear--triumph--they all mingle in an atmosphere as effective as the Cornish sea.
"A powerful novel of Cambridge life, or rather the story of a Cambridge student with the university sketched in with rapid and sure strokes as a place through which Dune’s tragic and lonely figure moves. The sentiment is lofty and manly--Hugh Walpole walks with a sure and firm tread toward a definite goal."--_The Independent_.
The theme of _Maradick at Forty_ again gets into the life of every man and every woman; a theme equally timely in 1000 B.C., 1000 A.D. and 10000 A.D.--the question of what is to be done when a man wakes up to find himself getting almost old, with life slipping from him to the next generation. One may smile at the white slave terror, and be quite selfish as regards educational movements, but one cannot smile away the progress of one’s self from the forties into the fifties.