What goes on inside Rockall? A fascinating hypothesis is supplied this week by T. H. White, in [The Master], which he himself describes as 'a simple adventure story with a suppressed moral.' I don't think most readers will want to bother very much about the moral, which is supposedly the fashionable modern one of megalomania, brainwashing and the thirst for absolute power, etc. Nor, oddly enough, does one take the adventure part of the book very breathlessly either…. The real gratification, as in T. H. White's former novels, comes from the author's personality and his mode of conveying it, a mode that seems particularly English in its assumption and corresponding avoidance of certain things—bravery, loyalty, sex and so forth—and its appearance—despite these limitations—of absolute intellectual freedom, which comes from its unself-conscious abruptness and its inconsequential poetic drift around arresting topics, like the expression...