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“... from old magazines. Gilbert, we are told, rated his short stories highly and several of them, as Peter Haining shows, were adapted for stage productions: notably, the one about the upsets caused in an English village by a widely distributed love philtre, which was the basis of The Sorcerer. Several of these tales exploit a vein of supernatural ...”

“... In 1887, Rider Haggard earned more than £10,000 by writing: only 31, he was probably the highest-paid novelist in England. Twelve years earlier, he had been packed off to Natal as an unpaid flunky to Sir Henry Bulwer. Haggard’s father, a wealthy Norfolk landowner, had considered him too dim for any public school; later, Africa seemed the best place to dispose of such an unpromising younger son ...”