simple straightforward "mystery story" about an imaginary League of Nations Assembly which somehow dissolves without much result in a subterranean banquet chamber.
In 1924 she chose as epigraphs for "Told By An Idiot" the walking shadow passage from "Macbeth" and a sentence of Paul Morand's to the effect that "history, like an idiot, mechanically repeats itself." If there was to be laughter at the expense of the feminine Intellectuals Rose Macaulay proposed to herself the pleasure of being the first to laugh!
"Told By An Idiot" is saturated with the pitiless, disintegrating, depressing irony of one who conceives that she has seen through "the illusion of progress." "Why so hot, little man, little woman?" she seems to inquire, with a frosty detachment which I find extraordinarily exasperating. "What we are doing and planning and hoping so hotly, with such an elate sense of its novelty, is very old stuff, my children. Come, peep in here at my little puppet show. Here you shall see the generations pass, one by one—Victorian, Fin-de-siècle, Edwardian and Georgian. Mark them well and four times you shall see history mimic the vain spectacle of your anxious progress from the cradle to the grave, with all your empty mouthings and ineffectual gestures. Come, let us amuse ourselves. As the whirligig of dead time spins past us I will mention for you all of the score or so of odd little 'interests' which constituted life and its zest for each of our little marionettes, as, for examples, the untimely death of the Duke of Clarence, the alarming increase of female bicyclists and the prevalent nuisance of that popular song, 'Ta-ra-ra-ra-boomdeay.'"
I should like to call "Told By An Idiot" a heart-
