Potterism is a way of thinking, in that it isn't thinking at all, just repeating stale thoughts and unfinished ideas. The Anti-Potterism League wishes to combat the deadly malaise of Potterism spread by the Potter empire's newspapers, but they get caught up in their own cleverness. Rose Macaulay's satire of the 1920s newspaper scene shows her despair of the British public ever seeing sense.

One of the more bracing novels about life on the Home Front during the First World War, which agonises over how one is to fight, if one cannot fight. All possible types of non-combatants appear here in a story about integrity, indifference, living and dying. Rose Macaulay, one of the most honest novelists of human nature, wrote in this novel a marvellous record of life as it really was lived. Buses, tea-shops, house-keeping, church-going, refugees, newspaper headlines, country walks and having fun at Earl's Court to blot out the thought of men dying across the Channel: all human life is here. For readers who want the details that matter.