HERE are forty years in unusual aspect. The author entered
the Civil Service in 1904, working with seventy clerks in South Kensington under an elderly, silent Victorian chief-clerk. He finished his career in 1944 in the West Indies as one of the – circus," as it was called, of travelling advisers on welfare and development. Through all Mr. Nor- man's experiences in many fields of the Civil Service runs an unconscious apprecia- tion of its distinctive homogeneity At White- hall he found an efficient serenity in his senior colleagues, whose highest attainment he considers was their capacity for concili- atory tact. His naive and entertaining institutional anecdotes of Whitehall life, some of which do not survive retelling, and the impressions that politicians made there, re-create this secluded homogeneity. Duties frequently took Mr. Norman from this atmosphere to manage, for instance, Irish labour exchanges just before the rebellion, Belgian refugees of the Great War in Holland, or to be an active delegate on the International Labour Organisation at Geneva. Always he went, however, as a stranger immune to the excitements and muddles around him. In this book, the layman sees famous men and crowds and the landmarks of the last fifty years, through the professional eye of one to whom national and international problems are unemotional routine. This is not to say that the author is inhuman : on the contrary, he possesses an energetic sensibility which often (and this should be of particular interest to Civil Servants) leads him beyond the normal bounds of a Civil Servant's activity ; one such excursion, to address an unpoliced mass-meeting in Jamaica, might well have
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