Taken as a whole . . . the essays in This Living Hand reflect the wide tastes and interests of a rather old-fashioned aesthete. . . . A teacher in a colonial-style school in Kenya introduced him [author Edmund Morris] to poetry, and he has had an aptitude for graceful quotation ever since. . . . Except for a casual aside about nearly starving a couple of times, he keeps to himself the perpetual struggle of living as a freelance writer.