  ‘England’s a country that fills one with a kind of impotent and maddening despair’, he said. But he also emphasized that ‘London is the place to meet worth-while people’, saying not very long after he arrived, ‘We have so far been much more “successful” in London than we ever expected’. There was also a disappointment awaiting him: the SCM Press had declined a book manuscript on theologian Karl Barth he had sent to them just before leaving New Zealand. Next he tried T. &amp; T. Clark, but the book never did see the light of day.