CHAPTER VII1
Neville Walsingham, known the world over under his pseudonym of J. B. S. Neville, had all the qualities which make a successful writer. He wrote admirable prose, lucid, rhythmical, shapely, with a real understanding of words and a capacity to use them in a forcible and original way. Perhaps his outstanding quality was controlled dramatic emphasis: everything he wrote was exciting—and at the same time highly literate. Someone had once said of him: “He’s a common denominator between the Royal Society and the twopenny libraries: he embraces brows of all dimensions because he’s a natural dramatist.” There was, also, inherent in his writing, a sense of detection: like Kipling’s famous mongoose, his motto was ‘Run and find out.’ and he satisfied his readers not only by facts, terse
