publisher Macmillan, starting with The School for Scandal in 1927. His talent was attractive enough for him to be contracted to the literary agency Curtis Brown, and his second book, the satire Adam and Eve at Kew, or, the Revolt in the Gardens, written in late 1926, would eventually appear in early 1930 with illustrations by the fashionable young artist Edward Bawden. Early in his career, Herring worked for the publisher Allen & Unwin. He was assistant editor of The London Mercury from 1925 to 1928 and a regular contributor, particularly of film criticism, until the journal was sold to new owners in 1934 and J.C. Squire ceased to be editor. At the same time he contributed film criticism regularly to the magazine Drawing and Design: The Magazine of Taste, up to 1929. He became film critic at The Manchester Guardian in mid 1928, being one of the newspaper's best paid freelance contributors for several years. From 1932 onwards he reviewed ballet for the newspaper. He also became London Correspondent for the film magazine Close Up, contributing 38 feature articles between late 1927 and 1933, making him the journal's third most prolific contributor behind the editor Kenneth Macpherson and Oswell Blakeston. He was a regular contributor of talks about the cinema for the BBC and was published several times in The Listener, including two specially commissioned pieces, which were rare in a journal whose content had to be almost wholly the transcripts of earlier broadcasts. On several occasions the BBC considered hiring Herring as its contracted film correspondent. In 1938 he became film critic of the Glasgow Herald. Herring also delivered what was almost certainly the first official lecture on cinema at Cambridge University, on 13 August 1934. He took over editorship of Life and Letters in 1935, when it was purchased by Bryher's Brendin Publishing Company for £1200. He held the post for about 15 years, working initially with Dorothea Petrie Townsend, an old school friend of Bryher's who was a highly experienced editor with commercial magazines. The magazine's title was modified to Life and Letters To-day, the content of the magazine changed radically, with a large film section being included, directly under Herring's control, and the circulation expanded. The first issue featured articles by Mary Butts, Murray Constantine, H. D., Havelock Ellis, Kenneth Macpherson, Lotte Reiniger, and Gertrude Stein, besides contributions by Sergei M. Eisenstein, André Gide, Horace