... . 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 ...

... 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 ...

... . 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 ...

... AN OUTSTANDING WAR-TIME NOVEL Nevil Shute's Stirring Tale of the R.A.F. The Love Story of Goethe and Lofte Kestner Victorian Hilarity and Stuart Intrigue -By Vernon Fane IT is time the British public sat up and took notice of Mr. Nevil Shute. Not long after Munich, and just about the time when this country was becoming A. R. P.-conscious, a novel was published called What Happened to the ...

... THE GALLIC TOUCH French Authors in Form This Week --By Vernon Fane I HAVE read three detective stories this week, two of them by a Frenchman and one by an American lady, and I must say, with more honesty than chivalry, that the French product is infinitely the better. In fact, since the stories are by M. Georges Simenon it may be said that they are in a class by themselves, and almost hors ...

... . 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 ...

... VARIETY for the BOOKSHELF Jacob Epstein's Autobiography: A Book for Wine-Lovers: Historical Miniatures Escapist, Light and Crime Fiction -By Vernon Fane JACOB EPSTEIN has always been a controversialist. Like most artists, he is sensitive to criticism; but, unlike those who are content to answer criticism in their own work, he has seldom missed an oppor tunity to take up the cudgels in print ...

... FICTION IN MANY FORMS A New Sinclair Lewis Novel Among Others in a Mixed Bag -By Vernon Fane FOR the past few years Mr. Sinclair Lewis has been giving evidence of a growing interest in the theatre. He has written for it, he has studied it, he has attended it, he has even, on a number of occasions, acted in one. It was obviously inevitable that a novelist of his gifts-- and he remains one of ...

... The Theatre: By Herbert Farjeon Lights Up! (Savoy) RE-ENTER Mr. Cochran. And about time, too. For-- speaking as a dramatic critic-- London isn't really London without him. And a war-- remembering the revues he put on during the last one-- isn't really a war. Those early Cochran revues were the first over here to combine wit with intimacy-- only when peace came did Mr. Cochran start making ...

... The Theatre By Herbert Farjeon Peril at End House Vaudeville THE ideal solution in a detective play takes you completely by sur prise and makes you feel a fool not to have thought of it; combining, like all the best things in the theatre, the un expected with the inevitable. What, however, usually hap pens in a detective play is that you guess the answer or, being told the answer, don't see ...