Nowadays little more than a name, L.H. Myers (1881–1944) is remembered chiefly for a dictum about "the deep-seated spiritual vulgarity that lies at the heart ofour civilization". Yet he was a serious novelist ofthe inter-war years, uniquely acclaimed by highbrow criticism and the general public alike: his major work, the trilogy The Root and the Flower (1929–35), won two well-known literary awards and, by 1943, had effectively gone through four editions, one of them for the Book Society. I once mentioned my interest in Myers, apologizing for its obscurity, to a lady who was at Oxford in his heyday. "Myers?" she replied to my surprise, "Oh, yes! Everyone was reading him in the Thirties."