As I am carried on the top deck of a bus down Oxford Street, and see at the end of that avenue of brightly decorated windows the majestic façade of Peter Robinson’s emporium, and consider how it dwarfs the circus it surveys, and when I see from the top of Regent Street, far down beyond the jagged row of roofs and chimney stacks, the lovely low-roofed curve that the demands of utility are busy condemning as a piece of unserviceable decoration, I grow a little wistful, not so much because a beautiful thing is being taken from us, but out of a distrust as to what manner of buildings will take its place. I look nervously into the future. I see a young man, his coat and waistcoat flowered with the brocade of early twenty-second century fashion, passing here in whatever means of locomotion the young blood of that period elects to honour. I see his eye resting contemptuously on this jagged mosaic of ill-assortment. “They made that mess,” he will say to his companion, “in the beginning of the twentieth century.” I am afraid that of the Georgian poets and novelists he will be as ignorant as the majority of us are to-day of the obscure contemporaries of Wordsworth; that he will find a history of our political practices as tedious and as corrupt as those of the other periods with which he has had to acquaint himself for the satisfaction of his university examiners. He will be merely interested, casually, in his spare time in the form life took in 1923 for the average man and woman, and, as he will have inherited from us the amiable quality of laziness, he will favour the short cut; he will be content to contemplate, to absorb the atmosphere of our public buildings, and I am more than a little afraid that, as he passes through Regent Street to Oxford Circus, he will shudder, as we do when we wake from a bad dream, with the shudder that becomes a smile, with the slow reassurance through familiar objects of an averted evil. And he will laugh and point to the façade of Peter Robinson’s, “Typical Twentieth Century!” But will it matter? Will it affect us how people live on this earth in 1990? We shall not be here to see them. They will be unable to distract and confuse and harass us with their intelligence or stupidity. It is only our egotism that makes us humbly prostrate ourselves before them. It is considered unworthy in a writer to address himself to the men and women of his own generation. But surely it is more sociable in us to wish to be of service and entertainment to our friends than to their grandchildren, who may develop, for all we know, into singularly unpleasant persons. Personally, I would much prefer my books to be read now by my contemporaries, by people I know and like, than by strangers when I am dead, with my books incidentally out of copyright.