A FELLOW we know, who is having a book out in London soon, has just received a note from his literary agent there that says, “More for your amusement than because it calls for the slightest action, I thought you would like to know that, according to your publisher’s legal experts, you have apparently defamed a hotel in Dorset by commenting that although their cold meat left nothing to be desired, the same could not be said about their brown soup. The publisher has now altered the original sentence, which read, ‘The cold meat was quite good, and only the flavour of the brown soup recalled the war,’ to ‘The cold meat was quite good, and the flavour of the fine brown soup recalled the war.’ “ A “fine” brown soup—a dish formally listed on British menus as “brown Windsor soup”—is as hard to imagine as a “fine” dislocated elbow, our man says, and he thinks that the solicitor’s readiness to detect libel in so noncommittal a reference to soup betrays a national sense of culinary guilt. He points out that if he had written of an inn in France, “The flavor of the pot-au-feu recalled the war,” any Frenchman would have taken it for granted that he meant the incomparable flavor. Like a bride with her first biscuits, he surmises, a country that can’t cook demands constant reassurance. ♦