by Emory Holiday

You who have read my little pamphlet on the art trade, and indeed on the education of a genius (myself), will know that it is hard, quite hard, to live and to work quite so finely. Challenges build and follow you about. Little goblins (other people) harass and stalk you at every turn. I’ve certainly found it so. People are so envious. They do hate talent so.

by Lee Yan-tao

When you rule a country you cannot but rule all its people. This is a bad thing if, as has happened in the past, people are bad and behave badly. And some people are very bad, bad in ways that are not imaginable. Worse than you might think, if you have not seen it yourself and learnt all about the ways people truly behave when given the means to choose their own governments, their own codes of behaviour. We in government deal with strikes. We deal with strikes at times that are not best. No time is a good time for a strike. They may come at worse times and at better times.

You may remember me. I expect we have met. You’ll have certainly read of me, under another name most likely, or have read something I’ve put on paper. I’m an expert, you see, on the subject of crime. Not all crimes, you understand. I leave most of that kind of work to other people. Call them professionals, if they insist. I don’t want to call them that, personally. They make too many mistakes. But they do also insist sometimes in my hearing, and I have nothing to do but to agree. They are professionals. I’ve said it. But I maintain my disagreement when they’re not around.

Lord John Tellbourne lived but briefly, and as testament to his life he left but one work, the slender Panglossia. The strange circumstances of that book’s composition are not necessary to explain to an educated audience, nor to the readers of this journal. Instead, the editors hope that the following, a written-up set of minutes from a recent colloquium on the subject, hosted by the Society for the Study of Interwar Writers and Artists, will be informative and entertaining.

The following took place in Verbier, as a result of the kind generosity of our sponsor, the Harlequin Press. Participants in the discuss need not be named in this introduction. They will make their presence known in course of the debates that came. Instead of a presentation of successive papers, speakers were encouraged to interject in the midst of others’ thesis statements. What followed proved, as it was intended to be, lively.

The compiler of these small extracts, James Snell, informs readers, first, that Mrs Emma Stark was born Emma Cassani. In her youth, Snell tells us, Emma Cassani wrote up a commonplace book of the sort that was fashionable in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A digest of her times. And, Snell says, Cassani’s work was interesting in its own right. Characters of her kind may be typical, but in a sense they are still rare. Cassani showed future readers precisely how she felt and thought. She was in that way an adolescent more communicative and self-aware than most. Even if her thoughts and words proved, in reality, ordinary; she was morbid, she was unhappy, she was romantically tortured. All as so many have been before and since, at that age and older.