... Technique for Beauty. By fane Gordon. (Faber 10s. 6 d.) THIS is a book to make mere man gasp: 100,000 words, 460 pages, the product of a year's research into no fewer than eighty- eight text-books by world-famous specialists, and all so that every day in every way woman may grow lovelier and lovelier. scientific, classified advice about every kind of beauty treatment, inner and outer, and ...

... American women have gone mad rough-house beauty treatments. Avenue beauties arc being stood elegant coiffures, for standing head is said to clear the comover Fifth on their on the plexion smooth out wrinkles. rhev are being r slapped with coarse hair mitts to make the skin fine, and pummelled until the tears start to their eyes, to pep up sluggish circu lations. Then they are sent home with ...

... A Lion in the Garden. By G. B. Stern. (Cassell 8s. 3d.) yOU see, it was this way Norman Pascoe, odd-job man who looked after boats Up-Thames, met in his garden an escaped show-lion about as man-eating as a Hollywood one. He said Pretty puss when he heard it purring behind him, then Good girlie, good girlie, and later to his wife and ma-in-law I 've put a lion in the kitchen, you 'd better ...

... The Theatre By Herbert Farjeon The Body ITas Well Nourished f Lyric) HERE, for a start, is a body in a piano. Why in a piano How in a piano That would be hard to say, but bodies must be put some- where, and in a new comedy-thriller it is up to the authors (in this case Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat) to find a new place to put them in. Imagine the thrill when some of the notes won't play. ...

... NOVELS IMPERIAL AND DOMESTIC --By Vernon F;me The Poet Laureate in Byzantium Fiction and War A Book of Roman Portraits THE Poet Laureate's latest work of fiction, BASILISSA (Heinemann. 8s.), is an historical novel based on the meeting between Theodora and Justinian. Much that is known about Theodora comes from sources which the historians describe as being open to serious doubts. Yet all seem ...

... BOOKS for the ARM-CHAIR TRAVELLER Night in Bombay; High Sierra; And so to Bath --By Vernon Fane MR. LOUIS BROMFIELD has travelled a long way since he gave Annie Spragg to the world, and became someone to whom the wit and beauty of Europe flocked to accept a delightful hospitality at Senlis. Senlis, alas, is no more, and Mr. Bromfield has very properly returned to the Ohio farm of his ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. THE title of Mr. Arthur Bryant's new book, English Saga, 1840- 1940, explains what it is about. It tells the story of England in the last hundred years; and it is not so much a history as the biography of a country, for to Mr. Bryant, England is not only a geographical expression and a nation, but a person, a person he loves and whose welfare he has passionately at heart. ...

... TlCL-. Notes and Notions By James Agate HOW I should like to distil my dis esteem of my contemporaries into prose so perfect that all of them would have to read it! So says that exquisite writer, Trivia Smith. It is not the remark I was searching for in his book. But there it is, like a lovely lost thing re-discovered in a rummaged drawer. Somewhere else he has an aphorism about boredom, ...

... The Theatre Anglo-Polish Ballet (Apollo) By Herbert Far j eon THESE Anglo-Persian Ballets are divided (as all Gaul used to be, and now, alas! as all Gaul once more is) into three parts, beginning (as so many ballet programmes do) with that miracle of tremulous formalities, Les Sylphides. Than this no ballet in the whole catalogue of ballet is more exquisite or more rigorously exacting. One ...

... The Theatre By Herbert Farjeon Thunder Hock (Neighbourhood) PLAY-PRODUCING societies, formed to present better plays in better ways, are such an old story now that the advent of a new one hardly makes pro fessional critics feel like jumping over five-barred gates for joy. These better plays, these better ways, rarely get be yond the Statement of Aims, which all say the same thing with devious ...

... The Bystander Bookshelf Diary of an Income-Tax Payer By V. S. Pritchetl A LITTLE mass-observation done on the index of Ego No. 4 (Harrap; 18s.) shows that Balzac, Sarah Bernhardt, Beethoven, Marie Felicia Malibran and the caustic brother Edward are still Mr. James Agate's chief pre occupations. Hitler, Ibsen and Sir Hugh Walpole don't do so badly either. The delightful Contes Scabreux, or ...

... The Theatre Herbert Farjeon Panto and Ustinov (Players' Theatre) The Players' Theatre in Covent Garden, being a period theatre, has appropriately celebrated the Christmas season by presenting a period pantomime, that period being the Vic torian 'sixties, when writers of skill and wit were engaged to provide principal boys, principal girls, principal comedians and principal cats with their ...