INTRODUCTION A book devoted exclusively to the appreciation of cheese has long been needed. So wrote Mr Morton Shand eight years ago,l and so far as can be discovered such a book has yet to be written. But in the interval such clubs as the Saintsbury, which dines twice a year in honour of the great scholar and epicure whose name it bears, and the Wine and Food Society have arisen, to prove that bestial indifference to the arts of the table is being countered by the few, and that many people are combining to recover the guidance of a great tradition in the choice of what they drink and eat. The simple hope of the following pages, therefore, is to aid the reader in the choice of Cheese to discuss the chiefvarieties available to him in England - to mention where some less common cheeses may be had and not to bore or colifuse him with technical details, fit indeed for cheese-makers and students for agricultural degrees but scarcely necessary at all to the enjoyment of a consumer. Indeed, the expert or epicure of cheese is only considered here in so far as he may be rovoked to break his silence. The writer is no more than an ordinary lover of cheese who, finding no elementary guide to help him in appreciation, has ventured to share with others in the like case such knowledge as he could come by fairly easily...