... . I HAVE always felt that creating character must be child's play beside the task of re-creating a living person. Fictitious characters are not lifelike, and though we call them lifelike, it is only in a Pickwickian sense. The truth is that no real character could be got into a novel there simply wouldn't be room. And, of course, historical biography,' in its presentation of human beings, is ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. TO the Four Winds of Love Mr. Compton Mackenzie has added a fifth--a zephyr that presently takes on a keener edge. In the final series, West to North will be merged in the complete volume-- The North Wind of Love --of which it forms the first part; meanwhile, it stands (as far as a wind can be said so to stand) on its own feet: very much so, in fact, for it blows with a ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. PICTUREGOERS who have always thought of Cali fornia as the Land of Promise, a golden world of sun-kissed oranges, Technicolor sunsets and marble swimming-pools, will find their dreams rudely shattered when they see THE GRAPES OF WRATH (Odeon). Here is California seen through different eyes the eyes of the hungry, the workless, the slave-labourer struggling to live on ...

... . BETWEEN the ending of the last civil war and the outbreak of the next, which is usually in Spain quite soon. Do you know the voice? I may have been exaggerating, but I thought the author of And No Man's Wit revealed herself, un mistakably, at that point in her opening sentence. To be sure. I had seen Miss Rose Macaulay's name on the jacket --a powerful aid to expertise. But still I am ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. ESCAPE from the world and its cares was never a very easy or practic able business, and it is less so than ever to-day, when the securest-seeming ivory towers are in danger of being bombed. And the imagination, which can never be wholly uninfluenced by world conditions, finds it increasingly difficult to con ceive a state of affairs in which physical, to say nothing of ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. STRANGE and inexplicable are the ways of film- producers. Take the case of Gene Towne, Holly wood scriptwriter and producer of THE SWISS FAMILY ROBIN- SON. for example. Mr. Towne, in mak ing his debut as a producer, set out to find a story with just one qualification. It must be, as nearly as could be established, the most popular piece of fiction ever written, one that ...

... CHARACTER STUDY NOVELS of TO-DAY The Vagaries of Human Nature As a Fictional Theme -By Vernon Fane AN eminent critic has said of Mr. Graham Greene that he is one of the really significant novelists writing in any language. That THE POWER AND THE GLORY (Heinemann. 8s. 3d.) is a novel which demands more than ordinary attention is apparent to anyone after reading the first three pages. For Mr. ...

... T he Book of the Mont h No Arms No Armour, by R. D. Q. Henriques (Nicholson Watson, 8s. 6d.) IF ever a book was distinguished by an exquisite sincerity, that book is No Arms No Armour. It is a first novel, but a first novel of such outstanding character and of such consummate artistry that it carried off the £3,000 prize in the All Nations Prize Novel Competition. The fact that it has as ...

... The 64 Bystander Bookshelf Shades of the Prison House By V. S. Pritchett THOSE who read Mr. Jim Phelan's Lifer guessed there was an auto biographical story behind it. Here it is: Jail Journey (Seeker and Warburg; 12s. 6d.). Its importance as a study of the English prison system from the inside is steadied by its lack of hysteria; it is an astonishing and moving human document of considerable ...

... My Royal Past, by Baroness von Biilop as told to Cecil Beaton (B. T. Batsford, Ltd., 21s.) STOICALLY and long have we suffered the memoirs of Teutonic ladies with royal pasts. Mr. Cecil Beaton has parodied them deliriously, with just the right flavour of satire, in a fragrant skit, a souffle of wit and malice. The baroness I can recall, when three and a half years old, dressed in broderie ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. I HAVE a very warm sympathy for the people who declare that they don't want to see any more war films or propaganda films just now; that they go to the cinema for escape. There is no need to ask, escape from what But I think that not enough attention has been paid, perhaps, to the complementary question, escape to what In these days we don't find escape in an entertainment ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. PEOPLE differ very much in the pleasure they get from dwelling on the past, and this difference does not altogether depend on whether the past-- their past or the past in general-- has been pleasant to dwell on. It depends chiefly, perhaps, on a habit of mind. Some conjure up the past because it was a happy time others, for the same reason, try to forget it it reminds them ...