... Books By CECIL ROBERTS An Intellectual Giant; A Champion of Compromise A Kaiser Apologist and a New Love Story THERE is a sense in which the novel is the supreme enemy of good literature. It has seduced untold numbers of excellent writers and turned them aside from their true subject- matter to the more remunerative and acclaimed field of fiction. There is, even to-day, practically only one ...

... James R. Ullman Takes a Rest froi Play 'producing, Makes an Amazonia Journey of the Maximum Discomfor and Returns to Set Down the T a. By VERNON FANE NOT a heartbreak, nor a dangerous illness, nor a spiritual crisis prompted Mr. James Ramsey Ullman to set forth on a voyage down the more uncomfortable reaches of the Upper Amazon, but a few printed sentences from those New York critics who make ...

... The World of Books Four Londoners on a Caribbean Is /and Provide the Theme jor Rose Macaulay s 1 IPou Id be Private Richard Chu rch humiliates the Ti^ide Humanity of Charles Pickens Reviewed By VERNON FANE MISS Rose Macaulay has one of those supreme advantages which can never be coaxed or bullied into existence. She is a wit, as naturally and as spontaneously as she is a born writer. This, we ...

... The World of Books Reviewed by VERNON FANE THE late Arnold Ben nett once said that it was practically impos sible for a poet to write bad prose. the compe tence of modern fiction is apt to pre sent a spectacle too often unrelieved from a dead flatness, and it is there fore a pleasure to open a book by the Poet Laureate and find a full- fledged story-- lit by good writing on every page. EGGS ...

... CRITICISMS IN CAMEO. THE CINEMA. THE third of Deanna Durbin's pictures, MAD ABOUT MUSIC'' (Leicester Square Theatre), is a delightful affair, picturesquely staged, and decorated with the musical interludes that are already familiar as the prerogatives of its talented young star. The story is a pleasant mixture of sentiment and the youthful bravado that, faced with the superior attitude of ...

... CRITICISMS IN CAMEO. THE STAGE. By J. T. GREIN. I. 44 FRESH FIELDS, AT THE CRITERION. NOW let me say this, first of all. At the Criterion you may see the finest acting in the world-- better than in Paris, better than in Berlin. Those two great actresses, Miss Lilian Braithwaite and Miss Ellis Jeffreys, have a kind of duel of female amenities that for distinction, subtlety, raillery, could not ...

... . By MICHAEL ORME. IT is doubtful whether the general public will regard so shattering an experience as WE FROM KRONSTADT (a Russian film introduced to London by the Film Society and now presented at the Academy) as enter tainment for a summer's day, or any other day, for that matter. It is, moreover, impossible wholly to ignore the picture's obvious bias, yet this documentary drama of the ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. THE HAPPIER EDEN, translated into terms of the situation presented and developed in Mrs. Kean Seymour's novel, means, roughly, the state of ignorance in which Miles Gresham would have liked to keep his wife as to his past life in South America before he married her. That experience was such as to make the word married, as a descrip tion of his present relationship with ...

... . CRISIS, we are all aware by now, is a touchstone. It has no mercy on the bogus or second-rate-- not even on the faintly bogus, the for givable second-rate. It shows up much of what we are, and what we feel, and makes it look silly. But, in a different way, it shows up the things that count. Whatever keeps its value and attraction at such a moment must be pure metal. This is true in the world ...

... Criticisms in Cameo. By J. T. Grein. i. ILLUSION, AT EVERYMAN. DID ever author write so difficult a part as that of Marie Louise in Jean-Jacques Bernard's play Illusion (L'Invitation au Voyage), inspired by one of Baudelaire's poems? Her plight is the constant haunting by the vision of a man whom we, the audience, never see--an unremitting obsession compared with which Lady Macbeth's ...

... The World of Books A Tragic Little Tale of American Provincial Life Cruising Along the Riviera Michael Arlen, as ever, Writes with Wit and Elegance By VERNON FANE THEY have a hard time in American small towns. If it isn't the long cold winters it's the long hot summers. Or the Women's Culture Club. Or the local tittle-tattle. Life seems far from kindly on those little main streets. THE HEATHS ...

... Eugenie The Empress Who Was Nearly Great Octave Autry's Fine Biography of the Courageous Consort of Napoleon III A Woman of Heart and Intellect THE WORLD OF BOOKS Reviewed by VERNON FANE A WISE cynic once said, None think the great unhappy, but the great. It is fairly natural that, observing beings who have all the advantages of birth, riches, beauty, brilliance, and a position of power, one ...