... BALBOA to MUSICK The Story of Pacific Conquest, and Other Books Briefly Reviewed When Vasco Nunez de Balboa, that roystering, ambitious and avaricious soldier of fortune, that prince of stow aways, set out for the New World, it was with the object of evading his debts in Spain. What he found was the Pacific Ocean and gold enough to pay off many times over the creditors he had left behind in ...

... (bfr I AM in no way 'psychic,' wrote Kipling towards the end of his life. I have seen too much of the evil and sorrow and wreck of good minds on the road to Endor to take one step along that perilous path. Yet some of his ghost stories haunt the memory. Seeing the dubious road from a safe distance, he was in a position to know that the most satisfactory kind of ghost must not satisfy, but ...

... Cbfr Ever Since Paradise (New) AS the new Priestley settled into St. Martin's Lane one parching night it raised a dense cloud of adjectives. It was delightful and witty; it was verbose and pretentious and pompous and boring; it was original and affecting. There was never a clearer instance of comedy forced to appeal over the head of critical authority to the decision of the indi vidual taste. ...

... lli/tilu'lh Ho wens IT is seven years-- too many-- since last we had a Nicholas Blake story. Minute for Murder (Crime Club; Collins; 8s. 6d.) signalises the mysterious Mr. Blake's reappear ance. Where has he been? Whatever the answer may be, he has by some means acquired uncanny inside knowledge of a certain wartime Ministry: he has called it the Ministry of Morale. Censorable secrets, I must ...

... STILL more American plays are making the perilous Atlantic passage. The latest recruit to Broadway-on-Thames had a fourteen months run in New York. This does not guarantee success at Wyndham's; but it will be odd if London rejects a piece that has its roots deep in the good earth of drama. The fact that it considers a problem unknown to Britain does not in any way weaken the theatrical ...

... Rupert Croft-Cooke PEOPLE OF QUALITY.-- I like Mr. Collie Knox's title. It reminds me of that fine short story of Galsworthy's which sketches the downfall of an old crafts man who could only make by hand the finest articles in his trade, and so was left behind by a world satisfied with the mass-produced and the nickel-plated. People of Quality are rare, as Mr. Knox implies when he chooses ...

... THERE are sales of fine books and first editions almost every day of the week up to the end of the month at Sotheby's. Moreover, the prices have settled at one of the highest points ever reached. These two facts are a pointer to the dis turbed international situation and the inflation at home. Many people have discovered that really fine books drop in price less than stocks and shares, and ...

... At TRe Pictures Query, Query, Query Yoiuigmnn (ar ...

... l li/alu'lli ooweiiA IT seems a far cry from John Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga to Louis Aragon's Passengers of Destiny (Pilot Press; 15s.). One is a study of restraint and tradition, the other of unrestraint, of trial and error, of people pain fully evolving their own law. One deals with England-- and with, possibly, the most English stratum of England-- the other with France: accordingly, there ...

... .wwwwwwwwwThe Moods Of Our SIR PHILIP GIBBS the novelist is still Philip Gibbs s the special correspondent, working on a broader canvas. Skilled, modest, painstaking, conscientious, S with no solemn literary pretensions, he mirrors in novel after novel the social and political moods and movements of our time, and has probably given us and posterity c a sounder fiction documentary of the past ...

... and Other Books Briefly Reviewed In the midst of her life-and-death struggle, Europe had no time to note, save in passing, the dire toll of conflict. Scarcely a day went by without some noble building in some part of Europe disappearing in a cloud of dust and rubble. We all knew full well that our rich architectural heritage was suffering a grievous, irreparable blow, but now come the years of ...

... : Reviewed by Trevor c >_Allen WARDROOM stories, at their best, take a lot of beating-- I've just read one about a flag officer at Gib. who used to row himself round the fleet in his skiff for daily exercise. One morning he rowed right inside the boiler-room of a badly holed destroyer, and was examin ing the damage in the gloom when a fat leading stoker shouted from the gallery above: Ere, ...