Rose Macaulay (1881-1958), born in Rugby and educated at Oxford, was created a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1958. One of the most popular satirical novelists of her day, Told by an Idiot, first published in 1923, is her panoramic tour de force, revealing, through the eyes of the extraordinary Garden family, the social, political and religious fortunes of England from the age of Victoria to the 1920s.