The simple story of an American magazine dedicated to the hymning of capitalism which hires a left-wing British journalist to join with a certain Captain exWestchester to expose the Merchants of Death, and of exWestchester’s plan to build an undersea tunnel to board the sunken hulk of the Lusitania. And other crazy things like that.
The late writer’s cousin and close friend offers a bittersweet recollection of a man whose powers of acid insight were at odds with his need to wall himself off from reality. Beneath the snobbery and satire lay “the sense of inexplicable doom.”
ClAUD COCKBURN is a friend and contemporary of Graham Greene, and for a time they both attended a school run by Graham Greene‘s father. After his graduation from Oxford, Mr. Cockburn became a foreign correspondent for the Times of London, serving in Berlin, then in Washington, and wherever else his assignments called. The Editor of Punch rates him the best journalist in London today f and on the strength of this praise the Atlantic asked him to scrutinize the success of Britain‘s most widely read weekly, the News of the World.