The Cambridge-educated Torr was a classical scholar who wrote two volumes on the history of Rhodes, as well as one on Ancient Ships, which is still consulted. He was an avid, observant traveler who made an annual trip abroad for forty-six consecutive years, commencing when he was ten and ending as the First World War loomed over the Continent. He spent much of his life in Devon, where he came to inhabit his grandfather’s house at Wreyland. There he listened to his neighbors, considered their customs, consulted the copious diaries and letters left to him by his father and grandfather, and mined his own travel journals to catalog, in poised paragraphs and circumscribed vignettes, whatever occupied his mind. His eye for the comic, together with his affection for both his shared locality and his private legacies of family lore and worldly learning, make Small Talk at Wreyland an ideal and engaging personal testament to the passing pageant of the years—and a desultory reader’s delight.