280x226mm. TLS. Single sheet. From Cecil Roberts to Verily Anderson. Headed on Cecil Roberts s Grand Hotel, Rome paper. It reads: 'Jan 12.73 | Dear Verily, | Thank you for your card with the photo. I am glad the review pleased | you. On Regatta day I lunched with Mrs Burros [sic] and Dorothy Bruce was | there, just out of Racing Hospital where a broken leg had taken her. I was | able to give her a copy of Books and Bookmen about your book. | Its an odd littl [sic] world. With your card and its view of John's | lodging next door, which came while Dorothy B was teaing here, came | a card from John also, like yours, with a design of Bartholomew Fair. | I learned of your marriage (OH what courage and I haven t dared once), | at Hodders, when signing my book, and was shown down and given as copy, as a | sort of Barriage Testament, and learnt also you had become John s | landlady, as it were. I know that narrow staircase out of the street, | but not your lordly entrance next door. Mottistone I knew as a boy, | he was the g.son of Sir Charles Seeley of Nottingham, who was my Chairman when | I was a Lib Candidate. And I also knew Galloping Jack Seeley, who went | into politics. I am so old I have known everybody. | If you come to Rome you have to make two calls, one on the Pope | in the Vatican and one on C. R. in the Grand Haotel [sic]. | Blessings | Cecil Roberts.' An interesting letter from Cecil Roberts (1892-1976), written just three years before his death in 1976. The recipient, Verily Anderson (1915-2010), was author of many children s books, autobiographies, and non-fiction. Roberts was an English journalist, poet, dramatist and novelist. Roberts said that on coming of age he drew up a list of aims for his next 15 years, which included a solid career as a novelist, membership of Parliament, ownership of a country house and a London pied-à-terre, and marriage with two sons and a daughter. Some were achieved, but not the last. In private he claimed proudly to have been a lover of Laurence Olivier, Ivor Novello, Baron Gottfried von Cramm, Somerset Maugham, and Prince George, Duke of Kent. However, his autobiography is discreet: "I don't want any succès de scandale," he said, adding he was "nauseated by the striptease school of writers".