In Pursuit of the English is a completely misleading title, suggesting as it does an updated England, Their England (a job that, incidentally, badly needs doing.) Mrs Lessing does bring up to date one or two characters from Ze Mad English rep. company—the comic landlady and the comic colonel—but she is in fact concerned with some rather untypical people in a rather untypical house. Even on these terms, the book is vaguely unsatisfactory. There is nothing wrong with any of the characters as such. They're all colourful. They're all credible, except when they come together in a Mr Muddlecombe court scene. It's just that the house where Mrs Lessing lived seems to have been some sort of depot where characters awaited their turn to be dispersed into contemporary novels. Flo in one novel and Rose in another, and Mr MacNamara alias Ponsonby (a marvellous and original...