... Chicken Every Sunday (Savoy) IT is a sobering reflection for those who make light of national differences that the airiest trifles when put to the test are found to have their roots deep in the soil of a particular country. We all know that while on one side of the English Channel Racine is despised and Shakespeare worshipped, on the other Shake speare is tolerated and Racine adored, but here ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. WAR AND SOLDIER is an account of the Japanese campaign in China, beginning with the fight ing at Hangchow in the autumn of 1937 and ending with the capture of Canton in 1938. The writer, Mr. Ashihei Hino, was a business man and a novelist before he became a soldier. To read a partisan novel in a non-partisan spirit is by no means easy. War is a controversial subject in ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. THERE is going to be a lot of fuss over the screen treatment of Rachel Field's ALL THIS, AND HEAVEN TOO! (Warner), but per sonally I find myself on the side of the screen-writers. You will remember that Miss Field's long novel fell into two parts. The first dealt with the life of a nineteenth- century French governess in Paris. It described how Henriette Desportes, just ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. THERE was a time when a man of learning could make all knowledge his province. I imagine that in the seventeenth century it was still physically possible for one man to read all the books that had ever been written. How wonderful to know all there was to be known on any subject! Perhaps Francis Bacon was in that happy position. Shakespeare notoriously was not. Ben Jonson, ...

... Continued. J Mrs. Harrison-Beddoes, who queened it in the foreign colony, and kept her position with the help of a sharp tongue and a faculty for ferreting out other people's affairs and Robin Rattray, who was not his father's son. To them enter four others Clive Markham, Robin's real father, intent on persuading his sister to return to England and help him to manage the country house he had ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. THAT trusty old battle ship of a comedy, Ian Hay's and Ste phen King-Hall's MIDDLE WATCH, turns up again at tne Regal this week, with a new coat of paint, and Tack Buchanan on the bridge. Mr. Buchanan appears as the woman- hating captain of H.M.S. Falcon, who learns, to his complete embarrassment, of the presence of two personable young ladies in his ship after the last ...

... By V. S. Pritchett GEORG KAISER, the German drama tist, is well known outside of Germany as the author of that startling piece of theatre, From Morn Till Midnight. This play showed, with bizarre theatrical effect, how a bank clerk robbed the till in order to satisfy various romantic illusions and ended his course of disappointment by blowing his brains out on a crucifix. Intoxicating symbolism ...

... Films of the Day Strong Spring Makes Watery Coffee By George Campbell IF the credit-list is evidence, My Son, My Son! is good. After dazing you with Madeleine Carroll, Brian Aherne, Louis Hayward, twenty-four other stars and featured players, the producer, director and original author, it goes on: Screen Play Lenore Coffee Photography Harry Stradling, A.S.C. Dialogue Director Stanley Logan Art ...

... By V. S. Pritchett THE autobiography of Constancia de la Mora, In Place of Splendour (Michael Joseph; 12s. 6d.), is a delightful, intimate and spirited account of the struggle of a rich and beautiful Spanish girl to get out of the Spanish Doll's House of upper-class life in Madrid before the civil war. I doubt if many people in England can imagine exactly what that life was like indeed, to the ...

... : Reviewed by Trevor ^Allen PROBABLY the most tense episode in our naval war was the hunting and killing of the Bismarck after the loss of the Hood. One may relive the radio excitement of that chase in Commander E. Keble Chatterton's The Royal Navy: January, 1941-- March, 1942 (Hutchinson, 21s.), a period which included also the Balona bombardment, Cape Matapan battle, and loss of ...

... by Playbill THE theatre has probably never meant so much, both in London and the 'provinces, as it does to-day. That is not to say that every theatrical produc- tion is full of meaning; many of them, in- cluding some of the most popular, mean precious little. But there is a probably unprecedented boom, and the living drama, from Shakespeare to pantomime, is being supported (most London ...

... 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 ...