"A government ministry decides to increase national brain-power, and stave off the coming idiocracy, through a program of compulsory selective breeding. The propaganda efforts in support of this endeavor are amazing. The book ends on an ambiguous note: Is the victory of "human perverseness, human stupidity, human self-will" over autocratic bureaucracy a triumph? Or not? Macaulay - a beloved British writer best known for The Towers of Trebizond - worked in the British Propaganda Dept. during WWI. When British censors discovered that What Not ridiculed wartime bureaucracy, its 1918 publication was stopped. An influence on Huxley's "Brave New World.""--

Rose Macaulay; introduction by Matthew De Abaitua