an idiosyncratic mystery novel. Sitwell, sure in himself of the techniques he was exercising, went on to write several further novels, including Miracle on Sinai (1934) and Those Were the Days (1937) neither of which received the same glowing reviews as his first. A collection of short stories Open the Door (1940), his fifth novel A Place of One's Own (1940), his Selected Poems (1943) and a book of essays Sing High, Sing Low (1944) were reasonably well received. His "The Four Continents" (1951) is a book of travel, reminiscence and observation. Rat Week Sitwell was a close friend of the Duke and Duchess of York, future King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. In December 1936, when the abdication of King Edward VIII was announced, he wrote a poem, Rat Week, attacking principally the former king and Wallis Simpson but also those friends of Edward who deserted him when his alliance with Simpson became common knowledge in England. Because of its libellous content it was not published but Sitwell ensured that it was circulated privately. In February 1937, a version appeared in Cavalcade, which Sitwell described as a "paper, which confounded liveliness with mischief". The Cavalcade version omitted the "offensive" references to Edward and Wallis. This resulted in the poem's gaining an unwarranted reputation as being sympathetic to the Windsors over the way some of their friends had treated them. Cavalcade also missed out a verse in which a number of the "rats" were named explicitly, as to publish this would have been libellous. Sitwell sued Cavalcade for breach of copyright. He obtained an interim injunction preventing further publication in Cavalcade, which ensured further surreptitious circulation of the poem. When the full case came to court, Cavalcade tried to get Sitwell to produce the missing verse. Sitwell resisted on the grounds that he could not be forced to make a criminally libellous statement. The case ended up in the Appeal Court, where Sitwell won and obtained damages and costs. Sitwell knew that, because of the libel issue, the poem could not be published in his lifetime; he decided that publication should wait even longer than that to avoid "pain to those still living". The poem was first published posthumously in 1986, the year the Duchess of Windsor (as Wallis had become) died, by Michael Joseph in a book entitled Rat Week: An Essay on the Abdication. Sitwell, in his essay,