BD. Edmund Blunden

35. ‘English Lectures in Japan: A Reply to Miss West’. Letter to the Editor. Daily Telegraph, 6 July 1931, p. 15.

Rebecca West’s review of Binyon’s Landscapes in English Art and Poetry (BC23) had criticised the quality of lectures given in English in Japan (Daily Telegraph, 3 July, p. 15). Blunden’s reply was quick and testy. The lectures given by such ‘gifted men’ as Ralph Hodgson (Ap), Robert Nichols (Ap), Sherard Vines (Ap), Arundel del Rey, William Plomer, Peter Quennell (Ap), and others ‘have inspired a great deal of intellectual and personal animation’ among Japanese students, and Ichikawa Sanki (Ap), ‘one of the most accurate philologists in the world’, had recently visited London and informed Blunden ‘with particular happiness’ that Binyon’s lectures ‘had been a marked success, even an historic occasion’.