They Went to Portugal

'What a queer and delightful book you have made out of what seems an impossible subject,' wrote Gilbert Murray when, at the end of the War, Rose Macaulay sent him They Went to Portugal. Who would have imagined that the long line of British who had lived, travelled, worked and fought in Portugal could have yielded such entertainment? Certainly not Collins, her publishers. One of the most famous novelists of between-the-wars had sent them an enormous new manuscript, impossible to categorize, but certainly not fiction. Three years' research had gone into it. When the doodlebugs made life in war-time London especially unpleasant, she turned down an invitation to stay in Oxford. "I should love to come,' she replied, 'if I weren't so tied up in Portugal. But I must keep at it; and that means the Records Office, and about twenty books around me for each bit I tackle."Rose Macaulay had not written a continuous history; she composed - under loose headings such as 'writers', 'royalty', 'tourists', 'prisoners of Dom Miguel' - a gallery of individual portraits and group studies.