... . 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 ...

... 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. IT doesn't surprise me in the least to learn that GONE WITH THE WIND is going like hot cakes at the Empire, Palace and Ritz. There never was a film, I suppose, that gave you so much for your money. For three hours and forty minutes it tears your emotions to rags, tosses you from crisis to crisis, involves you in war and panic and passion and suspense, gives you a bedside ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. LOVE and travel have often been combined, both in books and in life, but never, as far as I know, has the union taken quite the form it takes in Flight from a Lady. Mr. A. G. Macdonell's hero, Ralph (angry throughout the book, he is particularly put out the one time his name is disclosed), has been worsted in a love-affair, and adopts the time-honoured course of going ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. THE Art of Living is not an art that can be practised nowadays, but one finds a melancholy anti quarian or academic interest in hearing it discussed by someone who knows as much about it as does M. André Maurois, himself a member of a nation which knew more about it than any other of the modern world. Poor France One finds oneself dropping into the past tense, not only ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. IT must be nearly four years now since M.-G.-M. pencilled PRIDE AND PREJU DICE into their schedule as a vehicle for Norma Shearer. Four years in the film industry is a long time, and the surprise, now that the film does turn up (at the Empire), is not so much that Miss Shearer should not be in it, but that the picture should have been made at all. Few films that are ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. ENGLISH audi ences to-day are getting tired of fairy- stories, a weather- wise film man said to me recently. The war is giving them a sense of reality. They know that the world isn t one eternal Vienna Congress, full of gilt and gingerbread and flashy blonde women. They want to see pictures about England and English life not just documentaries, but dramatic stories, full ...

... THEATRES OF WARTIME LONDON. By THEODORA BENSON and BETTY ASKWITH, Authors of Foreigners or the World in a Nutshell. No. 17. BALLET AT SADLER'S WELLS. IT isn't true, said Paul, to main tain that We of The Press spend our whole time drink ing. We also pull strings. He was justly proud of having produced two good stalls for the season's three new ballets all on one pro gramme. in response to ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. ORIGINALITY is an im portant and exciting quality, but it does not necessarily make a good novel, and many good novels have been without it. True origin ality, I need hardly say, is something inherent in the writer's mind and imagination, and is to be distinguished from the experimentalism which often passes for it. No doubt some great artists have been experimentalists, ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. IT is quite usual nowadays to write an autobiography long before one has reached the age of thirty-five, but Mr. Henry Green feels that in his case the under taking needs an explanation. I will quote in full the opening paragraph of Pack My Bag, because it is the key to much that follows in an absorbing but baffling book, from which emerges an original and fas cinating ...

... THEATRES OF WARTIME LONDON. By THEODORA BENSON and BETTY ASKWITH, Authors of Foreigners or Hie It orld in a Nutshell. No. ir. SWINGING THE GATE, AT THE AMBASSADORS. AND the tiresome thing is, Laura went on, one doesn't want to go out with anybody else. Doesn't one said her sister Vivien politely. No. This evening, for instance, Timmy asked me to go to Swinging the Gate.' I hear it's ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. MISS VICKI BAUM writes from a hard head and a soft heart. She needs a hard head to do justice to the moral and mental equipment of her characters, who are nearly all, in one way or another, out for what they can get. Espe cially is this the case in Central Stores, her latest pantechnicon novel. From Mr. Crosby, who owns the controlling interest in the busi ness, to Philipp ...