... RECORD DF THE WEEK THE musical taste of the general public often takes a curious' twist, and those who are sworn anti-jazzites suddenly become conscious that something of this day and age is worth while. In the same way the jazz fiend discovers that the basis of this type of music is often directly traceable to a solid knowledge of the classics. Thus it is interesting to see that Sidney Torch ...

... GISSING AGAIN A New Edition of A Life's Morning, and Other Publications Briefly Reviewed George Gissing died in 1903. To-day, owing to the exigencies of war and a certain measure of neglect, his rather joyless novels are hard to get, and the author is known to a diminishing circle of readers. Gissing's early experiences in Manchester preoccupied him with poverty and its brutalising effects ...

... : Reviewed by Trevor zA lien FANNY KEMBLE was an unusual actress. The theatrical profession, she said, was utterly distasteful to me, though acting itself was not. Cast to play Desdemona, she confessed, I feel horribly at the idea of being murdered in my bed. She would dissect her own acting more ruthlessly than any critic, with no illusions that she was an inspired genius. She ...

... 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 ...

... DESPITE the paper and production difficulties, the autumn publishing season this year seems, from the volume of output, to be approximating to pre-war standards. With so little space available, it is obvi ously quite impossible to deal thoroughly with all the new books which have poured into this office from the presses, and the most a reviewer can do is to cover the output the best he can by ...

... MR. ERIC LINKLATER'S THE ART OF ADVENTURE (Macmillan. 10s. 6d.) is a book of essays which takes its title from his Rectorial Address delivered to the University of Aberdeen. The late Sir James Barrie made famous an address on a similar occasion which was, I believe, called Courage, and I remember seeing it condemned in round terms at the time as the quin tessence of the literary attitude to ...

... HISTORY IN HOO And Other Books Briefly Reviewed Where Thames and Medway meet in that narrow neck of land that lies to the north-east of Rochester and Chatham, where the Halstowe Marches stretch down to Egypt Bay, the Yantlet Creek oozes to the sea, and the flats of the Isle of Grain reach out towards busy Sheerness, on the Kentish mainland, is the Hundred of Hoo. This strange, almost eerie ...

... OUR BOOKSHELF Rupert Croft-Cooke REVIEWED ON THIS PAGE. CARRIAGES AT ELEVEN. CARRIAGES AT ELEVEN. By W. Macqueen-Pope. Hutchinson 21s.) Hutchinson 21s.) WINTER RHAPSODY. By Mary Dunstan. (Heinemann 8s. 6 d.) A STRANGE ADVENTURE IN THE LIFE OF MISS LAURA MILDMAY OF MISS LAURA MILDMAY. By J. Sheridan le Fanu. (Home and Van Thai 8s. 6d.) Home and Van Thai 8s. 6 d.) CASE FOR SERGEANT BEEF. CASE ...

... ORIGINALLY, I believe, Philip Yordan wrote his play for a white cast, about a Polish family living in Chicago. He consented to its production as a coloured play when the American Negro Theatre offered to do it in Harlem --and the rest is New York stage history. The piece, set largely in a Pennsylvanian mining town, ran on Broadway for more than 900 performances; and Hilda Simms and Frederick ...

... Shelley in Italy The Undertaker's Wife Ailglit Darkens the Street Elizabeth Hewens SHELLEY IN ITALY (The Chiltern Library, John Lehmann; 8s. 6d.) is an anthology of that poet's poems, selected by and with an introductory essay by John Lehmann. It includes the important Defence of Poetry. I have endeavoured, says Mr. Lehmann, in this volume to select, from the great mass of poems, finished ...

... (Mr Tfc- Finian 's Rain bow Palace) THE latest American musical comedy to reach us was surely not made for export. In its country of origin it has been received as an exciting successor to Oklahoma! and Annie; but here, for a variety of reasons, it merely suggests that the new style, which was to sweep English musical comedy away, is already beginning to degenerate into feeble imitations of ...