... A Week of Life Stories The World of Booths Reviewed By Vernon Fane THREE lives are the subject of this week's books, and three lives more strangely contrasted it would be difficult to imagine. A famous New York novelist and playwright writes her own life story from Kalamazoo, Michigan, to the Connecticut hillside which now luxuriously shelters her; Miss Katharine Anthony has written a study ...

... Charles Lamb Lives Again By VERNON FANE Charles Lamb, to those who know thee justly dear For rarest genius and for sterling worth ROBERT SOUTHEY wrote those lines about his friend not long before the death of the gentle Elia. In his lifetime Lamb was a much beloved figure, and to this day his readers still hold him in the same affectionate regard. There have been greater writers, more ...

... THE WAR ON LAND AND SEA --By Vernon Fane A Cruiser Epic Bromfield versus the Boche The Fifth Column Reaches Bloomsbury Miss Sitwell Reflects and Ponders Mr. C. S. FORESTER is supreme in his field: the dramatic, ingenious and poetic presentation of British sailors on the high seas. In the past, his novels (for he is essentially a writer who is happiest in the elastic bounds of imaginative ...

... LIVELY READING IN FACT AND FICTION -By Vernon Fane The Biography of a Flying Pioneer Eighteenth-Century American Frontier Battles A Ffovel of Occupied France, and a Thriller of the Week BILLY MITCHELL is known as the stormy petrel of American aviation, and his life is still regarded by many as an example of a man fighting against inertia and prejudice in high places, and against a re luctance ...

... Reviewed by PHILIP PAGE THE little Windmill Theatre, with its non- stop revue (which has not stopped, save for necessary rest and refreshment a few hours in the twenty-four for the company, for ten years or so) has other claims to consideration in addition to its record of hard work and the fact that it is the only London theatre to have had a play written about it and produced in New York. I ...

... MEMOIRS, MURDER AND ADVENTURE -Bv Vernon Fane Sir Henry J\[ewbolt's Autobiography, and His Lighter Side Three J\[ew Thrillers The Balkans Under Fire and let- or SIR HENRY oOLT (Faber and Faber. 2 is.) comprise the second volume of his memoirs which he started writing in 1932, six years before his death, and they have been edited by Lady Newbolt. This part of his reminiscences and diaries ...

... Reviewed by PHILIP PAGE PANAMA HATTIE.-- Rarely have I heard such witless dialogue as there is in this Cole Porter musical at the Piccadilly; every one was talking through his, or her, Panama hattie, and most of them seemed to need a microphone (and in one case a megaphone as well) in order to enable them to do it. Cole Porter's tunes are well below his usual level; indeed, the only music ...

... THE BEST BOOKS OF THE WEEK -Bv Vernon Fane M lie. Curie as a War Correspondent Biographical Essays of Two Saints The Story of a Bomber Pilot The Fate of the Islanders of Bonin MLLE. EVE CURIE, besides being the biographer of her great mother, is a war corre spondent of no mean ability. Her JOURNEY AMONG WAR RIORS (Heinemann. 15s.) is a brilliantly written journal of her experiences during the ...

... TWO good reprints figure in this week's list of books: the first, RAFFLES OF SINGA PORE (Collins. 7s, 6d.), which was written and published some years ago, but is well worth acquiring in its revised edition. Sir Reginald Coupland, who is Beit Professor of Colonial His tory at Oxford, is a superb biographer, as witness his Wilberforce, and this life of the founder of Singapore is not only an ...

... London, June 17th, 1903. In the whole history of literature I know of no case more mournful than the opening up once again of the domestic affairs of Thomas Carlyle. Twenty years ago such a discussion was inevitable; Carlyle had died in a halo of sanctity, the feeling for him on the part of an enormous audience being one of wild enthusiasm. Only those of us who were very young at the time and ...

... London, February 25th, 1903. It is good news that Mr. Augustine Birrell is about to write a Life of Andrew Marvell for the Eng lish Men of Letters series. A brief biography of Andrew Marvell is certainly very much needed, and I think Mr. Birrell possesses precisely the order of mind that will produce a beautiful book, a far better book than he has given us in his previous biographical ...

... London. October 30th, 1901. I had an exceedingly personal reason for visiting St. Ives on the occasion of the unveiling of the Cromwell statue. The fact can necessarily interest no one but myself that I have boyish and long family association with that quiet little town on the Ouse. I cannot, however, help a certain measure of peculiar interest in the treatment of the unveiling ceremony by the ...