Waugh’s novella (sometimes called A Sojourn in Neutralia), first appeared in Cornhill magazine, and was published separately in the same year in this form. Set shortly after the end of the Second World War, the story’s central character is Scott-King, a middle-aged schoolmaster who for twenty-one years has taught classical languages at Granchester, an English private school which was his own old school. Cautious and monosyllabic, he is described by Waugh as “a praiser of the past and a lover of exact scholarship”, and is characterized as representing the old-fashioned virtues of honesty, decency, sanity, and, ultimately, heroism. During his summer vacation, Scott-King visits Neutralia, a totalitarian republic ruled by a military dictator who was able to keep his country from becoming embroiled in the recent World War. The occasion for Scott-King’s visit to Simona, the capital city, is that by publishing an English language translation of a long Latin poem by Bellorius, a minor 17th-century Neutralian poet, followed by a monograph on Bellorius himself, he has come to be seen as a leading authority on the work. He has therefore been invited by the government of Neutralia to take part in a scholarly conference marking the poet’s tercentenary. Unhappily, Scott-King does not think to inform the British government of his visit. Frontispiece by John Piper