Mr. Artur Sammler, a Polish refugee in his seventies, living in New York with his niece, Margotte, is supposedly writing a mem oir of H. G. Wells. In the thirties, Mr. Sammler had lived in London; he had then been an Anglophile journalist. In 1939 he had been trapped in Poland at the outbreak of the War. His wife had been killed, and he had been buried alive in a death-ditch. Escaping from the ditch, he had for a time been a Partisan. The Bloomsbury life of the thirties holds little interest