Tom Wilcher, in Joyce Cary’s _To be a Pilgrim_ (1942), is nearing the end of a life much involved with politics. In this acute, witty, and compassionate book, Cary follows Wilcher’s attempt to keep a representative of the family in Tolbrook, its old home, and to inculcate into his niece and her little boy the religion which has been so vital a part of his own life. Through his recollections of his own experience and that of his brother Edward, Wilcher gives a vivid record of tense moments in England’s political life. He recalls the stormy days when he and Edward were pro-Boer, and the more explosive times which followed: There are no political battles nowadays to equal the bitterness and fury of those we fought between 1900 and 1914. It is a marvel to me that there was, after all, no revolution, no civil war, even in Ireland. For months in the years 1909 and 1910, during the last great battle with the Lords, any loud noise at night, a banging door, a roll of thunder, would bring me sitting upright in bed, with sweat on my forehead and the thought, ‘The first bomb--it has come at last.’ Ten years later, in _Prisoner of Grace_, Cary built a novel around the career of another Labour politician, Chester Nimmo. He secures attention and injuries through his pro-Boer agitation. Shifting his attack from the government to the landlords, he finally wins a seat in Parliament in 1902, later becoming Under Secretary for Mines. He is so intensely political that when he tells his son fairy tales, the wolf in _Little Red Riding Hood_ has “a face just like Joe Chamberlain.” The narrator, Nimmo’s unhappy wife Nina, reflects that: I suppose nobody now can realize the effect of that “revolution” on even quite sensible men.... But the truth is that it was a real revolution. Radical leaders like Lloyd George ... really did mean to bring in a new kind of state, a “paternal state,” that took responsibility for sickness and poverty. Like Shawcross, Nimmo stays on in the coalition cabinet of 1914, hoping to become Prime Minister at the war’s end. But he loses his seat in the general elections of 1922. At the book’s end he is, like Shawcross, a lord, but one who looks wistfully from the sidelines upon the struggle in the political arena. THE UNITED STATES