Mr. Mulliner

And similarly, there's the scene in The Hobbit where the... where Bilbo and the dwarves almost meet their end with the trolls in chapter three.

It struck me that the situation, some of the dialogue was very, very similar to a P.G. Woodhouse short story about a couple of Cockney burglars, which I discovered, one of the Mr. Mulliner stories, again, written in the late 1920s.

So I suppose what I mean is that the books are not... quite as detached from, you know, observable contemporary realities as you might assume.

Tolkien read newspapers and, you know, sort of observed the world around him as much as anyone else.