19 NOVEMBER 1965, Page 9

Homage to Gerhardi William Gerhardi celebrates his seventieth birthday next

Sunday. He is surely one of our most intelligent, versatile and, if one may say so, underestimated novelists. The author of Futility, that famous novel of the, 1920s, was born in St. Petersburg of British family, settled on the Neva, and in the First World War served in the British army in Russia: besides his novels, his studies of Chekhov and the Romanoffs, his autobiography, Memoirs of a Polyglot, all bear witness to his love of that, pre-revolutionary Russia that vanished in 1917. Between the wars Gerhardi was close to Beaverbrook, and he linked the world of letters, Mayfair and Fleet Street. Long may his wit continue to pour out as he looks at the world from his apartment in Hallam Street.