Bid Time Return. By Margaret Ferguson (Robert Hale. 12s. 6d.)
THAT Persia exercises a nostalgic influence on al Europeans who have lived in it is well known. Mr. Harold Nicolson, for instance, has expressed sentiments about the land in which he was born as affecting as, and much more cadenced than, those which the undergraduate is wont to feel about his old college. But none can have been so emotionally charged as the novelist, Miss Ferguson, who, to judge from the title of this book, fain would experience again the first eighteen years of her life. She, the daughter of a bank manager, was born in 1904, in Tabriz, in the north-west of Iran, but lived for the most part in Shiraz, city of Saadi and nightingales. Of adventures, what with Tangis- rani tribesmen and other tribesmen whom she phonetically spells " Kashgies," and, during the last war, with the intrigues of the historic German Consul, Wassmuss, she had abundance. But it must be confessed that there is not much significance in her tremulously, even carelessly, written narrative, nor does she add much to our understanding of Persia under the Qajars.
Previous page
