... By K. JOHN. By Taylor Caldwell. BECAUSE the country is vast, remarks Taylor Caldwell, Americans have evolved an architecture on the same scale. One might add that in recent years the inspiration has been at work on some of their novelists. As applied to fiction, it may be a true analogy, or a case of Who drives fat oxen should himself be fat; either way, it seems responsible for a number of ...

... NOEL COWARD sets his last scene in May 1945. Visitors who come, unprepared, to the Lyric Theatre, may assume from a glance at the programme that a drama of the war years will end with an orthodox VE-Day scene and, possibly, with a speech that will be a parallel to the famous toast in Cavalcade. Later, reading the programme more carefully, they may wonder what a batch of S.S. Guards and ...

... BOOKS IN BRIEF It's My Delight. By Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald. (Eyre and Spottiswoode ios. 6d.) And it s mine. The author haS friends on both sides of the fence, and while he makes game-laws and orthodox hunting interesting, his acquaintance with mouchers, tramps and gypsies enables him to reveal some other happenings on a shiny night. I can imagine no better Christmas present for anyone who is ...

... THE LITERARY LOUNGER. By K. JOHN. THE SIXTH HEAVEN. By L. P. Hartley. IN the unrelenting flow of current fiction-- much of it expert work-- it is very hard to retain impressions; each new novel becomes a wave obliterating the one before. At the time one may think differently, and label this or that outstanding, but the chances are that in a month or two the outstanding will be levelled ...

... OUR BOOKSHELF. L. P. HARTLEY. REVIEWED ON THIS PAGE. YOUNG ENTHUSIASTS. By Elizabeth Jenkins. (Collancz 8s. 6d.) SO WELL REMEMBERED. By James Hilton. (Macmillan 9s. 6 d.) THE HORSEMAN'S YEAR Edited by W. E. Lyon. Collins 10s. 6d.) THE GLASS HEART. By Marty Holland. Peter Dov/es 8s. 6d.) HOW seldom one comes across a book that has a form and flavour of its own! Many writers strive after the one ...

... DEATH IK THE THIRTEENTH DOSE. By Belton Cobb. When Detective-Inspector Cheviot Burmann set out to seek the murderer of old Mrs. Vance he was accompanied by Sergeant Ross, newly- returned to the Yard after having been invalided out of the Forces. Ross described himself as the dutiful lamb following at Cheviot's heels, but any respectable lamb would have blushed through his wool to have ...

... IT is long since the West End list has had so many revues in it. Tuppence Coloured, which has now come over from Hammer smith to the Globe with its brigade of authors, is all an intimate revue should be. It is wisely topical and satirical-- spearing the flying folly-- but Laurier Lister has seen that there are enough straight songs to vary the crackle-and-stab. Nothing goes on too long, ...

... THE LITERARY LOUNGER. By L. P. HARTLEY. WAR IN VAL D'ORCIA. By Iris Orlgo. THIS is a diary of the war as it affected the owners and tenants of an agricultural estate in Tuscany. It begins in January 1943 with the arrival, at the Marchesa Origo's villa of La Foce, of seven refugee children whose homes in Genoa had been bombed. (Afterwards this number was more than quadrupled.) It closes in ...

... By C. A. Lejeune. VIVERE IN PACE.-- The second of the new Italian films to be shown in London is of a smaller stature than Open City, but has much the same felicity of style, and the same warm humanity. Although technically a war film, it is very quiet. The scene is a drowsy mountain village which the war has almost passed by; the chief figure a genial, middle-aged farmer who wants nothing ...

... LA BELLE ET LA BETE THERE was a good deal of eyebrow-lifting in cultivated circles when it was learnt that Jean Cocteau, the poet and prophet of sur realism, had turned his complicated mind to the writing and direction of a fairy-story. Beauty and the Beast by Cocteau! cried the knowing. That cannot be! In a way, it isn't. True, the bones of the old nursery tale are there in the film ...

... THE British film version of L. A. G. Strong's novel The Brothers is something be tween a documentary and a melodrama: Man of crossed with one of the tougher French films of lust and vengeance. Technically, it is a very fine piece of work indeed, with beautiful photography of misty mountain and lonely loch, but not by any stretch of imagination could it be called soothing ...

... REVIEWED ON THIS PAGE. L. P. HARTLEY. THE ART OF THE FRENCH BOOK. Edited by Andrd Lejard. Introduction by Philip James. (Paul Elek £2 10s.) THE ROCK POOL. By Cyril Connolly. (Hamish Hamilton 8s. 6 d.) MRS. PALMER'S HONEY. By Fannie Cook. (Heinemann 8s. 6d.) FINAL CURTAIN. By Ngaio Marsh. (Collins 8s. 6 d.) THE ART OF THE FRENCH BOOK.-- Book production, though an enormous is also a ...