... YOU shall not know by what strange accident I chancèd on this letter, says Portia, at the end of The Merchant of Venice, when Shakespeare is bluffing shamelessly in order to get the play ended. Similarly, you need not know by what strange accident I was obliged to see most of Traveller's Joy on my feet, standing at the back of the Criterion stalls. I had not stood through a play since ...

... . By Jan Ciechanowski. (Gollancz 18s.) Yet another account of the betrayal of Poland. The author writes with clarity and authority. He was Polish Ambassador in the United States until his Government ceased to be recognised. it- ...

... . By Mary Durham. (Skeffington 9s. 6d.) Conventional crime but quite an ingenious solution ...

... By C. A. Lejeune. STALLION ROAD.-- Alexis Smith, Ronald Reagan and Zachary Scott in an open-air, unpretentious little effort about a three-cornered romance in the horsey districts of California. Not without strong attractions, because the screen can seldom go very far wrong with horses. Whether racing, jumping, exercising, grazing free, or cooling their fetlocks in the surf, these four ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. I HAVE often wondered, and never quite been able to deter mine, how it is that America can graft the silliest stories on to her flag-wagging pictures and get away with it, while the fiction-stories attached to our own Service pictures are apt to stick out like a sore thumb. Take Merle Oberon, for example. saying good-bye to Ralph Richardson in battle-dress in ihe Dion Has ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. I MAKE no bones about it. I am a Hitchcock fan. I go to a Hitchcock picture expecting something special, and nearly always I come away satisfied. Only twice in his long career has the chubby director really let me down. It is a great talent for drama Hitchcock has, and, unlike so many European film directors, he seems to have found in Hollywood a new success in implementing ...

... SAHARA. By Norman Lewis. (Cope 9s.) Short, highly realistic study of a British officer left in Algeria and involved in Franco- Arab troubles. Books in Brief ...

... . By Learie Constancine (tyre and Spottiswoode 8s. 6d.) An honest title. It is a book for cricketers and only for cricketers, but, I think for all cricketers. ...

... . By Osbert Sitwell. (Macmillans 18s.) Rupert Croft-Cooke I SEEM to be almost alone among reviewers in not being moved to ecstasy by this new volume of Sir Osbert Sitwell's autobio graphy, but I recommend it only to those who are already familiar with the earlier books in this series, and wish to hear more of the people described in them. Starting the story here I find its trivial content, ...

... K . By Stella Gibbons. Longmans I Os. 6 d.) With every book she writes, Miss Gib bons seems in her work to approach more closely to what she once cari catured in Cold Comfort Farm. The action of this novel is post-war and its characters are a soldier's wife and children, two Italian prisoners, a land- girl, and other visitors to Sussex, as well as local farmers and indigenous old women who ...

... key largo. A concentrated shot of violence in a hurricane-swept Florida hotel. Edward G. Robinson as a gangster of the old school, vainly tries to impose pre-war ideology on Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, a war veteran and a war veteran's widow. You won't doze off, but you may find it too rough for your liking. it the contact man. A modern morality play, with Ray Milland, as the best ...

... TO think that such a thing should happen to people like us! It is the cry of the decent, kindly suburban grocer, miraculously embodied by Miles Malleson-- looking as though he might have come from some latter-day Diary of a Nobody-- as he leaves the consultation cell in a London prison. And what thing has happened? Merely the condemna tion and sentence of his daughter upon a capital ...