... . By Joyce Cary. by Rupert Croft- Cooke Michael Joseph 12s. 6 d.) MR. CARY'S new novel might have been dictated on a fast journey and be intended for the entertainment of passengers on an airliner. It has an affectation of breathless speed, as though the author heard a voice telling him all the time to come along and not waste time on details. A paragraph may dispose of a couple of lives, a ...

... FOR four years during the war Mr. Sewell Stokes was Probation Officer at Bow Street Magistrate's Court, and COURT CIRCULAR (Michael Joseph. 1os. 6d.) is one of the fortunate results. The book is not merely anecdotal, as it could so easily have been, but a series of studies of the children and adults with whom Mr. Stokes came into contact at that time. He writes with sympathy and considerable ...

... THE THEATRE RING ROUND THE MOON. Next morning, ends Margaret Rutherford reminiscently, he crossed the frontier, and a bull killed him in Madrid. Who was killed, arid why? Heaven knows. It is the sort of speech we learn to expect in Ring Round the Moon, which is beguiling moonstruck nonsense, adapted by the inevitable Christopher Fry from the French of Jean Anouilh. You either hugely ...

... By Joanna Cannan. (Gollancz 8s. 6 d.) WHEN a novelist as truthful and skilled as Miss Joanna Cannan tackles a detective story, she is faced, I think, with certain special problems. It goes against the grain for her to employ trick characterisation, to show some one behaving in a way wholly inconsistent with his part in the plot, or to make him such a consummate actor that he can fool the ...

... GOLDEN SLIPPERS. By Horace Annesley Vachell I. (Hutchinson 9s. 6 d.) A man of many possessions, an octo genarian resident of Bath, is certified to have died of heart disease. But it is not as simple as that, and Mr. Vachell, himself in his eighties, has not lost his gusto or skill. MARY WAKEFIELD. By Mazo de la Roche. Macmillan 10s. 6 d.) No more need be said than that this is a new Jalna ...

... . By L. P. Hartley. Putnam 12s. 6d.) MR. HARTLEY is an intensely in dividual writer, and to me a slightly bewilder ing one. There is some thing esoteric in all his work, as though he were chuckling to him self and to a few initiated readers, and I have the uncomfortable feeling that some of the chuckles are at the expense of people like myself who do not quite know what it is all about. Not, ...

... . By Richard Llewellyn. by Rupert Croft- Cooke (Michael Joseph 10s. 6 d.) READING Mr. Llewellyn's new book gives one the sensation of being taken in a fast car over difficult roads and through undisciplined traffic by a supremely good driver. One has the same confidence, the same restful assurance that he cannot make a mistake. Every line of dialogue-- and a high proportion of the book is in ...

... THE GLORY OF DENMARK A Magnificent Pictorial Survey From Flensburg, on the Schleswig-Holstein frontier, to The Skaw, at Jutland's tip, from Esbjerg, on the west, to Copenhagen on the east. Denmark is a land that inspires deep devotion in its people, a longing among its exiles. It has a measure of variety, in the green verdure of the eastern shores, the forbidding dunes of the west, where the ...

... at rfe. '■Larger Than Life (Duke of York's) Anthony (ockinau IF Mr. Guy Bolton had given his characters other names and presented them in this romantic comedy as his own he would perhaps have been unfair to Mr. Somerset Maugham. It is from Theatre that the story of the play first recognizably comes. Yet it would be no less unfair to those who enjoyed the book to let them suppose that they ...

... Freda Brace Lochhart IF films must be foolish, by all means let them be funny. In the post-war preoccupation with civilian brutality, combat fatigue and affairs of the social conscience rather than the heart, films have forgotten to be frivolous. Three purposely funny films in one week have gone to my head so that I came home from Francis (London Pavilion) almost expecting my bull-terrier ...

... THE THEATRE VENUS OBSERVED. I like to talk, says someone in Christopher Fry's new verse fantasy at the St. James's, and Fry himself might say the same thing. He likes to talk, and we like to hear him, for no one in our theatre can talk better in his special vein. Certainly, in that vein. Fry's dialogue deserves the epithet exquisite used by Sir Laurence Olivier in his curtain-speech. It ...

... . By Francois Mauriac. (Eyre and Spottiswoode 10s. 6 d.) THIS book consists of two short novels, the title-piece and The Enemy (Le Mai), which have both been excellently translated by Mr. Gerard Hopkins. The first is a study of a father and son in their respective relation ships with a woman called Maria Cross. The father is a dim industrious doctor who, in his own family, rarely looks up from ...