Author's Preface:
I trust that this one-man anthology will seem neither pretentious in conception nor tedious in execution: for pretentiousness is next to ungodliness; tedium to nothing on earth.
The two historical sections are wholly new in book-form; indeed, only 'Piracy' has appeared at all. Of the miscellany, only the 'medical' essays have occurred in a book, and only one poem in an English periodical. The Appendix has been expressly written for this volume and would, in fact, be insufferable anywhere else. Of the sections on words, 'Inseparables' and 'Neither Cricket nor Philology' are here published for the first time in book form, and of the latter a part is wholly unpublished. Of the four essays in the literary section, the first three are reprinted from a limited edition that has been out of print since April 1935, and the fourth from The Scene is Changed, which soon will be. Of the fiction, 'A Lesser Lunacy' comes from a collection of stories that went O.P. as long ago as March 1932; 'Two Angles' is taken from my little-known Martial Medley, written in 1930-31 by various good fellows, published in 1931 by the Scholartis Press and now handled by Messrs Wm. Glaisher (High Holborn, London), who also handle Three Personal Records of the War; from the latter volume comes 'Footslogger', which constitutes a considerably revised two-thirds of my contribution to that three-authored work. E.P. (ix).
