Not That It Matters

The creator of Winnie-the-Pooh shares his musings on some of the matters of his day in this delightful collection of essays, short stories, and poems.  Not That It Matters is “a collection of essays from the end of that extraordinary silver age of English belles-lettres at the turn of the last century, when men such as Shaw and Belloc earned their daily bread by scribbling in newspapers and magazines about anything they could scrape a thousand or so words out of: socialism, dogs, the weather, how they celebrated Christmas, capital punishment, Wagner. For those who like this sort of thing, this volume is very nearly perfect. There are pieces on snobbery, oranges, cricket, bad fiction, ‘Smoking as a Fine Art’ (‘My first introduction to Lady Nicotine was at the innocent age of eight’), chess, thermometers, Holy Writ (‘Isaiah was the ideal author. . . . He kept to one style’), and—prophetically—those bores who fetishize ‘good brown ale’” (National Review).   “Milne writes on goldfish, daffodils, writing personal diaries, the charm of lunch, intellectual snobbery, and even what property program presenters would now call ‘kerb appeal’—but which was simply ‘looking at the outside of a house’ in Milne’s day. . . . It is still a delight and a joy to have Not That It Matters and its ilk waiting on my shelf.” —Stuck in a Book