SOURCE: "Brittania's Man," in The Specator, Vol. 229, No. 7526, September 23, 1972, pp. 472-73.

Green is an English jazz musician, novelist, and critic. In the following essay, Green classifies The Riddle of the Sands as a "call-to-arms" warning to the pre-World War British Empire.

The reappearance, in paperback form, of Erskine Childers's The Riddle of the Sands draws attention to a book which would read strangely at any time, but doubly so now that the world for which it was written has been whisked by events into the remotest past. The Riddle of the Sands was among the earliest, and was perhaps the best, of those Edwardian call-to-arms thrillers which acquired their tension from the British neurosis, real or imagined, regarding the possibility of some lesser breed without the law constituting a serious threat to their world dominance. It is not altogether without significance that the book appeared in 1903, soon after...