[In the following excerpt, Hastings charges that In the Pink is not on par with Balckwood's earlier works and fails to capture the romance of fox hunting.]

Caroline Blackwood … is a rich, somewhat fey lady who writes excellent magazine profiles and is the author of five novels. Her own family is seated in Northern Ireland, though she says that never since she was a child has she hunted, and then only after hares rather than foxes. But she became fascinated by the fact that more people in Britain today are following hounds than at any time in history, and installed herself in a large house in Leicestershire to write a book about the phenomenon.

The outcome [In the Pink] is a series of essays, some absurdly brief, about aspects of fox-hunting—hounds, quarry, devotees, and (not least) fanatical opponents. She was unimpressed by the "antis", whom she concluded, like others before her, are driven more by hatred of fox-hunters than enthusiasm for animal welfare.

But when she turns to hunting, she never comes close to gaining the feel for it that, say, Molly Keane possesses. First, although she writes with wonderment of its risks and the frightful serried ranks of wheelchairs that it promotes in the House of Lords, she did not try it herself.

This is a serious flaw, because one cannot write with conviction about fox-hunting without having experienced, even briefly, its terror and exhilaration. There is no intellectual case for field sports; only a very powerful romantic and emotional one, based upon the propriety of maintaining man's historic role as a hunter. It is almost impossible to argue about field sports with an opponent who has never tried them.

A day out hunting or shooting may well fail to convince the novice. But at least he can then perceive the basis of the argument and the experience, the priceless sense of intimacy with the countryside, that it inspires. Caroline Blackwood has tried to understand the fox-hunters, but has plainly never come close enough to them to do so. She has merely marvelled from a social distance, so to speak. Her book is full of little mistakes, irritating even to a non-fox-hunter like me: followers may join hounds at Second Horses, but never at Second Horse as she suggests. Colonel Derek Hignet, to whom she devotes a chapter, is a distinguished former Master of the Fernie, not the Pytchley; and so on.

Lady Caroline does not seriously discuss—or perhaps never identified—the central irony of fox-hunting today: that it is the principal force for the preservation of foxes. The fox-hunters will never admit this, for to do so would be to undercut all the traditional arguments about their social utility as fox controllers.

In reality, foxes are preserved in hunting countries with a fanaticism that commands derision in such areas as Hampshire, where they are shot, trapped and gassed whenever they show their faces. Here, the "antis", too, find themselves in hopelessly muddy waters. They cannot admit the role of hunts as fox protectors, because that would destroy the justification for all their agreeable little Saturday morning riots on winter days when Socialist Worker is not holding a seminar.

Caroline Blackwood limply concludes that it will be a sad day for England when fox-hunters can no longer etc, etc. But her uncertain meander across the hunting scene is put to shame by the cracking pace that Molly Keane and her peers sustain without faltering to the end.