For the past forty years, two-thirds of his long career as a writer, Mr. Frank Swinnerton has lived in a restored seventeenth-century cottage in the Surrey village of Cranleigh…. At least, he calls it a village, for, in spite of all the urbanization of the Home Counties, he has managed to remain confidently under the impression that he lives deep in the English countryside. Indeed, one of the attractions of Reflections from a Village comes from the otherwise by no means unsophisticated author's naive discovery of the garden, the village green and the commonest of wild birds and flowers…. There is nothing affected about this, however, for Mr. Swinnerton has preserved into old age much of the excitement with which he first began "to notice such things".

Old people do not merely remember the past, they carry part of it with them, and Mr. Swinnerton appears to wear...