So with Russia at war with Germany, and their British spies producing untainted information about the enemy, Russian controllers ordered Blunt and company to prove their authenticity by writing schoolboy essays on "My Road to Marxism".
David, if your article were a schoolboy's essay, it would score highly for style.
These are grim times, but anyone who doubts the value and importance of art galleries and museums should read a 14-year-old schoolboy's essay that went on show at Tate Britain this week as part of the 40th anniversary celebrations for the Tate Archive.
While it's easy enough to pass over some of Leavitt's minor slips (no one ever procured a "fellowship" at a provincial university), there are one or two real corkers: "Miss Haversham" for Dickens's Miss Havisham, for instance, and the schoolboy Hardy writing an essay about "Harold, son of Godwin, whose death in 1064 in the Battle of Hastings was portrayed in the Bayeux tapestries".
But here we begin to get a clue as to the origins of Walser's almost idiotic simplicity, in that two of the larger sections are devoted to the musings and essays of a schoolboy.
As a schoolboy, he dutifully read the prescribed essays of Addison, Belloc, Chesterton, Hazlitt and Lamb; for pleasure, he read Zane Gray and Edgar Wallace.
Inspired by an essay written by a local schoolboy, the community raised A$80,000 to commission a monument in Towner's memory.
For a canny schoolboy, it was also the right approach for an essay to have a chance of winning such a prize.
It is regrettable that, in the language in which the best modern essays have been written, English, the term "essay" should also have acquired the connotation of a schoolboy's attempts at elementary composition.
