Books & Authors

This is a list of other books and authors mentioned in The Last of Mr. Norris with a note of reference.

"Excuse me, please.  May I ask you something?"

"By all means."

"Have you read Winnie the Pooh, by A. A. Milne?"

"Yes, I have."

And tell me, please, how did you like it?"

"Very much indeed."

"Then I am very glad.  Yes, so did I. Very much."

Arthur had a signed set of volumes of My Life and Loves.  I asked him if he had kown Frank Harris.   "Slightly, yes, It's some years ago now  The news of his death came as a great shock to me.  He was a genius in his own way.  So witty, I remember his saying to me, once, in the Louvre: 'Ah, my dear Norris, you and I are the last of the gentleman adventurers.'  He could be very caustic, you know.  People never forget the things he said about them.."

... You have read something of Marx?"

I said that I had once tried to read Das Kapital.

"Ah that is too difficult,  for a beginning.  You should try the communist Manifesto.  And some of Lenin's pamplets ..."

"Ah, but the Apparition, the dumb sign,

The beckoning finger bidding me forgo

The fellowship, the converse and the wine,

The songs, the festal glow!"

~ Sir William Watson

(The Seven Who Got Lost) I took the book home.  It was certainly not at all bad of its kind.  Seven boys, of ages ranging from sixteen to nineteen, are washed ashore on an uninhabited island, where there is water and plenty of vegetation,  The have no food with them and no tools but a broken penknife.  The book was a matter-of-fact account, cribbed largely from The Swiss Family Robinson, of how they hunted, fished, built a hut and finally got themselves rescued.