This book is about celebrity, geography, and propinquity. The mysterious title needs to be explained. The “sixth continent” is neither fabled Atlantis nor some unrecorded Utopia of the mind. It’s simply a local Romney Marsh joke, or conceit, probably invented by the Marsh’s fable-maker, Ford Madox Ford, who offered it as an unsourced quotation in his book on Britain’s Cinque Ports: “These be the five quarters of the world, Europe, Asia, Africa, America and the Romney Marsh.” Kipling, who lived nearby, with his imperial touch, added “Australy” to the list, which explains Finlayson’s particular total. Romney Marsh stretches in Kent from the English Channel eight miles inland and fourteen miles down the coast into East Sussex. Its flatness does make it seem Continental, for it covers a hundred square miles. A millennial creation out of earth heavings, solidified by siltings and other geological vagaries, the Marsh may be described as a sea-level mesa with plenty of rank green grass, splendid for sheep and other animals. The Sussex portion is famous for its pigs. The figures in the landscape of the Marsh are certain authors who lived among a population of retired civil servants, London commuters, sundry amateur water-colorists, and a profusion of golfers. Finlayson’s subtitle is quite as mythic as his title, for he hasn’t written a literary history of the Marsh. There are two denials in his preface: “This is not a book of literary criticism, but a domestic history of the Marsh . . . . There