... 44 DAPHNE LAUREOLA IT is a Soho restaurant and in some disarray. The place, we gather, is being repaired. But who will worry? At Le Toil aux Pores the play must go on. Two spivs bargain in a corner. A bored man and woman argue. Four Cockneys twitter. Yorkshire and Poland are represented. And, enthroned in an alcove at the back, is a vision in shining satin: a lone diner who seems content to ...

... Continued. J Mrs. Harrison-Beddoes, who queened it in the foreign colony, and kept her position with the help of a sharp tongue and a faculty for ferreting out other people's affairs and Robin Rattray, who was not his father's son. To them enter four others Clive Markham, Robin's real father, intent on persuading his sister to return to England and help him to manage the country house he had ...

... THE LITERARY LOUNGER. By L. P. HARTLEY. CITY OF DEPARTURES. By John Brophy. IN his latest novel Mr. John Brophy has had the courage to vindicate priggishness. Most of his characters have streaks of priggishness and at least two of them are snobs. Thorneycroft and Beldon, who have made their way in the world, return to Liverpool, their home town-- the one from London, where the flying bombs ...

... OUR BOOKSHELF Rupert Croft-Cooke OUR REVIEWER'S CHOICE ALL I COULD NEVER BE. By Beverley Nichols. Jonathan Cape ISs.) ATTILA. By Louis de Wohl. Gollancz 10s. 6d.) BRAVE AND CRUEL. By Denton Welch. (Hamish Hamilton 8s. 6d.) TWENTY SHILLINGS IN THE POUND. By W. Macqueen-Pope. (Hutchinson 21s.) ALL I COULD NEVER BE.-- It would be difficult to find four books more sharply contrasted than the ...

... ANY work of Alfred Hitchcock's, whether successful or unsuccessful, requires more than a cursory glance from a critic, and my choice this week falls on The Paradine Case not because it is a particularly good film, but because the man behind it is one of the very few directors who is allowed to make his own mistakes, and knows exactly what he is doing. This version of the Robert Hichens novel ...

... THE LUCK OF THE IRISH. One of the few Hollywood whimsies that have nearly come ofi, thanks to the beguiling performance of Cecil Kellaway as a leprechaun in attendance cm journalist Tyrone Power. my own true love. Phyllis Calvert and Melvyn Douglas in one of Hollywood's cost fire side chats about post-war marriage and neurosis Don't worry if you have to miss it. There 'li be lots of others. ...

... Rupert Croft-Cooke TALKING OF DICK WHITTINGTON. --Those enviable people whom I hear tracing the identity of some person or object from the answers to the first six of Twenty Questions, seem satisfied with the classification Fact or Fiction. The book trade is more wary and speaks of all books which are not actually and obviously novels by the loose term Non-Fiction. All my four books this ...

... . . By Rom Landau. (Macdonald ys. 6d.) (Macdonald ys. 6d.) Neat short stones by a practised hand. ...

... . By E. M. Almedingen. (the Bodley Head; 8s. 6d.) A sequel to the author's autobiography To-morrow Will Come. It is all rather solemn and self-conscious, as befits the work of someone who was brought up in Russia, escaped to Rome in the 1920's, and eventually reached England, which country, her publishers say, she had always felt to be her spiritual home. What is a' spiritual home ...

... Films of the Day Strong Spring Makes Watery Coffee By George Campbell IF the credit-list is evidence, My Son, My Son! is good. After dazing you with Madeleine Carroll, Brian Aherne, Louis Hayward, twenty-four other stars and featured players, the producer, director and original author, it goes on: Screen Play Lenore Coffee Photography Harry Stradling, A.S.C. Dialogue Director Stanley Logan Art ...

... By V. S. Pritchett THE autobiography of Constancia de la Mora, In Place of Splendour (Michael Joseph; 12s. 6d.), is a delightful, intimate and spirited account of the struggle of a rich and beautiful Spanish girl to get out of the Spanish Doll's House of upper-class life in Madrid before the civil war. I doubt if many people in England can imagine exactly what that life was like indeed, to the ...

... : Reviewed by Trevor ^Allen PROBABLY the most tense episode in our naval war was the hunting and killing of the Bismarck after the loss of the Hood. One may relive the radio excitement of that chase in Commander E. Keble Chatterton's The Royal Navy: January, 1941-- March, 1942 (Hutchinson, 21s.), a period which included also the Balona bombardment, Cape Matapan battle, and loss of ...