Pamplet:
Produced for Betram Rota Ltd. and published by them at Bodley house, Vigo Street, London, W.1., from which these appreciations are taken.
Appreciations
- “Mr Jocelyn Brooke is one of the most interesting and talented of contemporary writers . . . we are left as delighted by the hundredth performance as we were at the first. It is magic—conjuring—of which we never tire: an example of what is called ‘art’ . . . As a discursive travel book it seems to me in no way inferior to Norman Douglas at his best.”
[Anthony Powell in a full-page review of The Dog at Clambercrown in Punch.]
- “. . . In this fourth autobiographical-fictional itinerary, the ways are more enchanted and twisty, the scent keener than ever. Here is a writer possessed by the magic—the voodoo—of childhood . . . Mr. Brooke is a pleasure to read—a highly individual pleasure.”
[G. W. Stonier on The Dog at Clambercrown in The New Statesman.]
- “How can I describe to you the excellence of this young writer? He has an ear for talk; an eye for the beautiful and a sense of the comic. He writes simply and he never shows off. Yet he is as subtle as the devil.”
[John Betjeman in a review of The Goose Cathedral.]
- “The skill and intensity of the writing made peculiarly haunting this cry of complaint on behalf of a bewildered Man.”
[Pamela Hansford Johnson in a Daily Telegraph review of The Image of a Drawn Sword.]
- “It has delighted me. Mr Brooke has given me two treats I love: the opportunity of reading good prose and the privilege of borrowing sometimes port’s eyes, sometimes of watching human nature through eyes certainly acute.”
[Desmond MacCarthy in a review of The Military Orchid.]
- “It could not have been written more delicately or sensitively.”
[Sean O'Faolian in a review of The Scapegoat.]
- “Jocelyn Brooke’s writing is imaginatively unique. This I have found from the first. In The Image of a Drawn Sword he shows an advance in power seeming to pass, within the story, from one dimension into another. Seldom have naturalism and fantasy been more strangely merged . . . Mr Brooke is a great writer.”
[Elizabeth Bowen.]
- “Mr Brooke has genuine gifts of characterisation and of catching a mood, in particular the mood of affectionate reminiscence slightly sharpened by embarrassment … The first half of ‘Gerald Brockhurst’ . . . is a brilliant and exciting performance, one of the best I can remember on the theme of getting to know a person.”
[Kingsley Amis on Private View in The Spectator.]
- “. . . a delightful and mellifluous style . . . a joy in this dark age of puritanism.”
[Times Literary Supplement on Private View.]
- “Jocelyn Brooke is a civilised and witty writer who seems to me, in his analytical approach to society, to have much in common with Anthony Powell.”
[Eric Keown on Conventional Weapons in Punch.]
- “An acutely perceptive critic with many a string to his bow and a strong historical sense . . . Art exploited as a mere pretext: that is the underlying theme of Conventional Weapons. I can think of no other novelist who has dealt with the subject so ruthlessly, with such skill and controlled imagination . . . Mr Brooke has ploughed his English corner of The Waste Land between the two world wars with a dexterity that compels our harrowed admiration.”
[Harold Acton on Conventional Weapons, in a two-page review in The London Magazine.]