J.I.M. Stewart's compilation of stories, Our England is a Garden,… charts the loss of certain English values the author clearly prizes…. Stewart seems unwilling to face the present: when we are told, in the second story (about a don invited to write his autobiography), that 'the best English memoirs, after all, had been written long ago, and he had read pretty well every one of them while still an under-graduate', the implicit attitude is that Culture belongs to the past. No wonder Stewart's Professor Mannering notices that 'a tremendous amount of nonsense is written about literature, even more than is written about history'. We know what literature is, dammit: you read it when you're an undergraduate, and it's not good form to question standards or values. Such attitudes predominate in Stewart's fiction—attitudes too conventional and received to really begin to test your own thinking and...