He wrote a weekly column for the New Statesman for twenty years until 1961 under the pseudonym William Whitebait.
[1] He was an adapter of Gustave Flaubert's Bouvard et Pécuchet, and his radio plays included Ophelia, The Shadow Across the Page, The House Opposite and Chap in a Bowler Hat.
He was also author of the well-regarded novella Memoirs of a Ghost and of six other books: Shaving Through the Blitz, Shadow Across the Page, Gog Magog, My Dear Bunny, Across London with the Unicorn, and Pictures on the Pavement illustrated by Edward Ardizzone.
He was the first to translate Jules Renard's classic tale of an unloved child, Poil de Carotte into English.
It was published (as Carrots) in 1946 by the Grey Walls Press in an edition illustrated by Fred Uhlman.