SOURCE: "A Saga of Africa," in The Observer Review, September 6, 1981, p. 29.

Burgess was an esteemed English novelist, essayist, playwright, and short story writer best known for his novel A Clockwork Orange (1962). In the following review of Letters from Africa: 1914–1931, he favorably assesses Dinesen's writing style, contending that she "never fails in grace, sharpness, and humanity."

At the end of 1913, Karen Dinesen left Denmark and sailed to Mombasa. She disembarked to marry immediately Baron Bror Blixen-Finecke of Näsbyholm, to whom she had been engaged for a year. Baroness Karen Blixen and her husband then went to Nairobi to manage a Swedish-owned coffee plantation called MBagathi.

They were not the only Scandinavians in East Africa, and the tradition of sending the skills of the Northmen, and their Lutheran conscientiousness, to Kenya continues: at a dinner table last night in Oslo I heard good Swahili spoken. But only Karen Blixen...