Illustrated Summoned by Bells - John Betjeman

John Betjeman's verse autobiography has sold more copies than any other English poem of its length this century. The touching story of a boy's growth to early manhood and the mixed joys and guilt of youth, it is also supremely a poem about places, buildings and surroundings - Highgate and Pooterland, t Cornish seaside and Chelsea, Marlborough among its Downs, the quads of Oxford, parish churches and tin advertisements on railway platforms. Who better to illustrate this autobiography than Hugh Casson, architect and former President of the Royal Academy, who has already delighted us with illustrated books on London, Cambridge and Oxford which show him to be as much in love with those places as Betjeman himself. Casson is Beqemz very near contemporary and was a close friend, matching him in passion for all matters architectural and like him a keen observer of the splendid and ridiculous. He has delighted in Summoned by Bells since it first appeared and his illustrations in line and water-colour are a perfect complement to the verse-