27 FEBRUARY 1982, page 21

Good Fighter

Anthony Thwaite In Defence of the Imagination Helen Gard- ner (Oxford University Press £12.50) T owards the beginning o f these 1979-80 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard,......

Foul Drain

Anthony Storr W illiam Mercer, alias Dornford Yates, began writing short stories for the Windsor magazine in 1911, when he was a young, and mostly briefless, barrister. The......