... TlC. _ English or French By James Agate ONE of my friends, a musical critic and a brilliant fellow, has one excessively annoying fault. He will never let you express admiration for a performance of some thing or other without telling you that he has seen the work performed better. Do you tell him that you enjoyed, say, Rosenkavalier at Sadler's Wells? He will tell you of better soloists and a ...

... The Theatre Goes Rural A Lonsdale Comedy in an Old Barn in Buckinghamshire Although thirty-three out of fifty theatres and music halls in London have applied for renewal of their L.C.C. licences, barely half a dozen of them are at the moment 44 in com mission. One show which might have been rehearsing itself to a dark-sheeted audi torium but instead was being played through and through in a ...

... -- By M. N. THOMAS ''I ALWAYS thought I liked vinegar with my salad, he said, ''but five years' marriage with you has given me all the vinegar I want. Yes, my love, she answered, m the coomg voice she adopted when she wanted to annoy him most, and when you look out for your second wife, you will choose someone unlike me, all saccharine sweetness and in five years' time, if you haven't ...

... THE CINEMA A Word of Warning By JAMES AGATE GILBERT, thou should'st be living at this hour-- England hath need of thee! Think of the things of which, with his appetite for wit and scorn, the great est of all comic-opera librettists would have made a meal. Gilbert died in 1911, when the same pre-war world at which he laughed so bitterly was already beginning to pass away. What, we may ask ...

... ENTERTAINMENTS a la CARTE Ba ylLAN &OTT HAD Black Swans been produced a year ago, it, instead of George and Margaret, might have started the vogue in lunatic comedy made out of moon shine and soda. But it need not join the caravan when, in one of these months or years, the moonstruck families that now fill half the theatrical bill in London fold up their tents like the Arabs and as silently ...

... Note The Day Is Over (Embassy) IF he is not more careful Mr. Terence de Marney will soon be our First Murderer. Whether tweeded for the coverts as a rich man's favourite nephew or (as now) collarless at breakfast as Auntie B.'s favourite lodger there is a gleam in his eye that marks him out instantly as a public menace. Cheerful Charlie, that's me, he says with disarming intent, but his ...

... THE CINEMA Oysters and Aeroplanes By JAMES AGATE AT first sight aeroplanes and oysters have nothing in common, and at first sight neither have L'Equipage and Austern- lilli, the two new foreign films I propose to review this week. One, moreover, is French, and the other German. But both have the common denominator of a charming young lady who causes a vast deal of bother-- in the French case ...

... THE CINEMA By JAMES AGATE Should This Be Shown I VERY nearly didn't see Confessions of a Nazi Spy at the Warner, largely because I don't believe in nagging servants! If you have a cook who ruins everything she sends to table, you either put up with burnt offerings or you take your courage in one hand and a month's wages in the other and confront the wretch with whatever is the cook-discharging ...

... reviewing BOOKS ELIZABETH BOWES Asia CECIL BEATON was sent to India and China by the Ministry of Information to take photographs. The narrative of his journey, Far East, has been published, but only a few of the vast number of pictures taken could be used to illustrate it. Hence it was decided to issue two supplementary volumes, each reproducing about 100 photographs to a large scale Thus ...

... BOOKS ELIZABETH KOWEIt A History of Trinity College, Dublin T.C.D. A HISTORY OF TRINITY COLLEGE, DUBLIN: 1591-1892 (Dublin University Press; 15s.), is the work of Constantia Maxwell. Lecky Professor of Modern History at the University of which she writes. This book adds to our ever-increasing debt to Professor Maxwell --to her humane and friendly interest in general life, to her power of ...

... Lips like apple wine. My soul for thee doth pine. You 're older than Auld Lang Syne. Thus Richard Morgan burlesques, with inter ruptions, to the tune of Liszt's Liebestraum, transferring to the wax sheer nonsense with terrific effect. This is one side of a new His Master's Voice recording BD 1 162, played by Spike Jones and His City Slickers. The reverse is devoted to Lincke's The Glow-Worm, ...

... THE CINEMA Jew Suss J/ at the Tivoli By JAMES AGATE OBVIOUSLY the first thing is to congratulate Gaumont-British on the enormous amount of care, archæology, and money that they have spent on mounting this super and, I am afraid, super-boring Jew Süss. Always, of course, supposing that any energy expended in this way is a matter for congratulation. My own view is that it is a colossal and ...