E. V. Lucas

''Edward Verrall Lucas'' (June 11/12 1868 ��� June 26 1938) was a versatile and popular English writer of nearly 100 books. His style has great facility, and is generally found insipid by contemporary readers; some of his cricket writing has lasted. He is now remembered for his essays and books about London and travel, appearing in many editions, and his biography of Charles Lamb. He was a close friend of Edwin Lutyens. He was born in Eltham, Kent into a Quaker family, and educated at Friends Public School in Saffron Walden. He worked first in a Brighton bookshop and then on a Sussex newspaper followed by 'The Globe'; rising without university education to the 'Punch magazine' 'table' in 1904. He became a prolific writer, providing extensive content for Punch and a column "A wanderer's notebook" for the Sunday Times. He was responsible for A. A. Milne teaming up with E. H. Shepard for the Winnie-the-Pooh books. He wrote under pen names EVL, VVV, E. D. Ward, and FF for film criticism. Some of his early work was in collaboration with Charles Larcom Graves (1856 ��� 1944), another Punch writer. Rupert Hart-Davis collected and published a collection of his essays on cricket, 'Cricket All His Life', which John Arlott called "the best written of all books on cricket'.<ref>'Arlott on Cricket', edited by David Rayvern Allen, Fontana/Collins, 1985, p188.</ref> From 1924 he was chairman of the London publishers Methuen and Co.. According to R. G. G. Price's 'A History of Punch', his polished and gentlemanly essayist's persona concealed: :'a cynical clubman ��� very bitter about men and politics ��� [with] the finest pornographic library in London'.