After reading the obituary for Arthur St. John Adcock in the New Statesman and Nation (14 June 1930), a reader responded, "I hope that [the Statesman] will duly give us a finished study of the author ... in all his fields and duties." The reader's request remains unanswered, and not only by the New Statesman; there remains no full-length biographical material or critical overview of Adcock's career as novelist, journalist, and essayist. And no wonder: a study of Adcock in "all his fields and duties" would be a prodigious task indeed. Such a project would require a wide-ranging literary and critical endeavor. It would have to take in novels and several ambitious verse projects (the London Times obituary speculated that Adcock would be primarily remembered as a poet after the publication of his Collected Poems the year before his death), a considerable amount of journalism and polemical prose for the British...