[The Georgian Scene] contains essays on approximately seventy-five writers who range in time from Henry James to T. S. Eliot and in importance from Shaw and Bennett to Edgar Wallace and Noel Coward. A few of the discussions are quite perfunctory, and the space devoted to each often seems to bear little relation to either the popularity or the significance of the subject, but the best are genuinely illuminating and nearly all both informative and readable. Mr. Swinnerton quite frankly discusses his authors from the point of view of an enthusiastic reader of catholic taste rather than from that of a critic with dogmatic ideas. He walks around each subject, noting significant biographical details and, in a very large number of cases, supplying personal reminiscences. He proposes no standards other than very general ones and he makes no final judgments. But he does achieve a panorama, and few...