24 FEBRUARY 1950, Page 18

• George Sampson

Stit,—I was very glad to see your warm appreciation of George Sampson in the Spectator of February 10th. We readers owe him a great deal, if it were only for his Concise Cambridge History of Literature, a book I treasure very highly. It contains amongst other good things what I consider to be the best balanced appreciation of Shakespeare I have ever read, and his final chapter on recent writers seems to me a model of judicious criticism. His History is one of four books I should want to take if I had to be marooned somewhere—Shakespeare, the Bible, the Oxford Book of Quotations and Sampson.—Yours faithfully,