... 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 ...

... . By Victor Canning. (Hodder and Stoughton 9s. 6 d.) THE SLEEPING SPHINX. By John Dickson Carr. (Hamish Hamilton 8s. 6d.) is made easier by the fact that an Italian girl with a jealous lover has fallen in love with Burgess, and the lover, as one of the Resistance Movement, has learnt not to over-respect human life. The climax comes when the pine trees which will span the chasm have been felled ...

... By C. A. Lejeune. DECEPTION, with Bette Davis, Paul Henreid and Claude Rains, is a handsome film with a certain amount of style; but the trouble is that the style has hardly been applied, at any point, to sense. It tells a triangular story of a famous refugee 'cellist, who comes to New York, marries a girl whom he has loved in the old clays in Europe, imagining her to be poor and innocent, ...

... By LAURA EYRE. WHEN Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret visited Ealing Studios during the making of Nicholas Nickleby, they both confessed that they hadn't read the novel-- as yet! But they were quite familiar with many of the characters. They knew the rapacious, bullying school master, Wackford Squeers the genial ham actor, Vincent Crummies the lovable Cheeryble Brothers, and ...