Water on the Brain is a squib that in places is very funny indeed. It is also entirely unambitious, since loaded with nonsense reducing it well below the level of satire. But it will remain readable for so long as secret services exist—that sort of activity being, or being popularly supposed to be, exclusively carried on by button-headed bad hats superannuated from our very grandest public schools.

Compton Mackenzie, certainly, had found a new and delightful stamping ground which he could frequent during occasional periods of fatigue in his astoundingly prolific career. The Monarch of the Glen is perhaps the most successful of the frolics that resulted. It concerns the triumps and indignities alternately enjoyed and suffered by Donald MacDonald, twenty-third of Ben Nevis, who inhabits a world suggesting, similarly in alternation, that of P. G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit and John Arden's Armstrong's Last...