... The Floating Line for Salmon and Sea-T rout. Some Easters ago Mr. Anthony Crossley, during the Parliamentary recess, went to the Upper Dee to catch salmon. The river was low, the weather very cold, and the trip looked like a fiasco. But at Mr. Crossley's hotel there was one angler, younger than them all, who returned nearly every day with a fish or even two. He was extremely slow. He couldn t ...

... Of Mice and Men (Gate Theatre) ill MERELY a matter of a monosyllable, remarked a character in one of Pinero's early, plays. But a mono syllable can make a deuce of a difference, even when it does not happen to be a negative. Mice and Men was a charming romantic and Quakerish comedy of Edwardian times which the late Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson made a big success, and, later, found his I ...

... The Dancing Years (Drury Lane, 8) ''FOR this is jolly good Novello, this is jolly good Novello, this is jolly good Novell-o-o. And so say all of us! To provide any sort of adequate entertain ment for Drury Lane is a heroic sort of task. To do it superlatively well and to do it time after time is something even more than that. The Dancing Years is an obvious winner, and if it is obvious in ...

... The Sportiseum Table Tennis now in-Stolled THE special Christmas-circussy sort of show, labelled, for some strange reason, a Rocket, has been succeeded at the Coliseum by a variety bill. It is the custom of rockets to go up and not to go down, and this one did not, I have a suspicion, go down at all. However, all is well now, and last week s variety entertain ment was one of exceptional ...

... Peter Scott lives in a lighthouse in front of which he frequently enter tains several hundred wild geese and ducks of many varieties, including the pink-footed and the barnacle goose as well as pintails, shovellers, teal and tufted ducks. He describes in this book, with anecdotes, the feathered friends he has seen and studied in Hungary, Roumania and Persia. And in 24 full colour plates and ...

... This volume is a selection from the note-books of Herbert Atkinson, the famous painter of game fowl. A number of his paintings and drawings are reproduced. Atkinson, one of the founders of the Oxford Old English Game Club, was much travelled and had studied every aspect of game fowl. A part of the book is devoted to the Life and Letters of John Harris, the Cornish Cocker. George Bayntun, Bath, ...

... THE CINEMA Pre-war War Films By JAMES AGATE OVER and over again as I sat watching the preposterous but thrilling An Englishman's Home at the London Pavilion, my mind reverted to one of the greatest war films the cinema has ever thrown up. This was The Burgomaster of Stilemonde, adapted from M. Maeterlinck's play. Incidentally, a comparison between these two films proves that Euclid was wrong ...

... Films of the Day Pure and Lifeless By George Campbell TIME was when desperadoes who stole an apple, or chucked a stone through a window, had only to bleat, Please, your honour, I saw it in a movie, to be sent home with the Bench's sympathy and a present from the poor-box. They can't get away with it nowadays. The films were always on the side of the angels, not because pro ducers were better ...

... The Bystander Bookshelf The Medmenham Scandal By V. S. Pritchett IT is the modern rationalists, so the doctors say, who run straight to the cranks and the charlatans; and books like The Castle of Otranto, things like Wesley's belief in witches, and the morbid preoccupation with the tomb, show that one only has to take the elegant lid off the famous follies of the eighteenth century to discover ...

... The Theatre By Herbert Farjeon Important factors in the case Old Jim (Gordon James and Queenie (Leueen MacGrath Saloon Bar Wyndham's) THE action of this play takes place in its title, which is a good one; and since the scene, so warm and well-polished, so bright and gaudy and comfortable, is even better than the title, let high credit be given at once to Michael Relph, who designed it. As soon ...

... The Bystander 99 Bookshelf Who 's Who in Asia By V. S. Pritchett MR. JOHN GUNTHER wanted to call his new popular Who's Who of the Orient Outside Asia, on the honest ground that no Westerner could be inside that continent. One can be inside Europe because Europe is an entity; there is no common heritage for, say, the Indians and the Japanese. Hut to be an outsider looking in on Asia is no ...

... 44 The Mikado Makes the Screen By George Campbell WELL, they have dared at last to bring Gilbert and Sullivan to the screen, and Savoyards and anti-Savoyards-- people who think it sacrilege to let an American crooner like Kenny Baker play Nanki-Poo, and girl fans who say (as I actually heard one say) that Kenny Baker didn't oughter go around in a beige-and-blue kimono like a geisha girl-- are ...