... BOOKS IN BRIEF It's My Delight. By Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald. (Eyre and Spottiswoode ios. 6d.) And it s mine. The author haS friends on both sides of the fence, and while he makes game-laws and orthodox hunting interesting, his acquaintance with mouchers, tramps and gypsies enables him to reveal some other happenings on a shiny night. I can imagine no better Christmas present for anyone who is ...

... by Ray Allister (Deputising for Robert Done, on holiday.) OF two October plays, one was right for television; the other was just right. I want to demonstrate the world of difference between their qualifications. It 's a honey of a play. We were talking three weeks before the play was produced. The speaker was Royston Morley, senior television drama producer, and the honey was Frank Tilsley's ...

... WE 'LL HEAR. -A PLAY. By J. C. Trewin. (Carroll and Nicholson 12s. 6 d.) MY colleague, Mr. J. C. Trewin, has an inveterate love of apt quotation-- no the thumbed phrases that are pulled by the hair out of dictionaries of Quotations and dumped down in the text, but those supremely right yet somehow unanticipated sentence which fit his text without strain. I find this gift for quotation an ...

... . by Rupert Croft-Cooke By Marguerite Steen. (Collins 12s. 6 d.) THIS novel is planned and executed in the heroic tradition. Like Miss Steen's earlier book, The Sun is My Undoing, it has a central character who sees and does, knows, feels and dares, while around him is an ever-changing panorama of scene and character. It is thus in the main stream of English fiction, in direct descent from the ...

... . By Marghanita L'aski. Cresset Press 9s. 6d.) THIS is the straightforward stor of Hilary Wainwright's journe to France in 1945 to find his sma son, who had been lost during th Occupation. It is a good idea, and Miss Las! has handled it with some skill, but it lel me thinking, not without exasperation, ho\ much better it could have been. Wainwrigh himself is stuffy and starched and only reall ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. LOVE ON THE DOLE, which you can see at the Odeon this week, is a very moving transcription of Walter Green wood's Lancashire play. It is the story ot the mill hands and their families in any Lancashire town, but in parti cular the story of the Hardcastles of Hankey Park father, mother, daughter Sally and eighteen-year-old brother Harry. Pennies are scarce enough in Hankey ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. THE most startling film-- with the possible excep tion of Our Town-- to come out of America since the Coward- Hecht-McArthur Scoundrel is in- town this week. The title is CITIZEN KANE, and you can, and should, see it at the Gaumont. It is the brain-child and hand-work of twenty-six-year-old American Orson Welles, who goes in for .startling things. Welles, as you may ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. THE KING'S GENERAL is an historical novel-- a blend of fact and fiction, as Miss Daphne du Maurier calls it-- whose subject is the Civil War in Cornwall. Corn wall, my readers will not need reminding, was always staunchly Royalist, and Miss du Maurier's hero, Sir Richard Grenvile, grandson of another, better-known Sir Richard, was the King's General in the West. As she ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. DESTINATION CHUNG KING is the auto biography of a Chinese lady, born in Honan and bred in Peking, who, in 1937, when barely twenty, came to London to study obstetrics. Her natural bent was for literature, but Science was our god, a beneficent god to make of China a rich and happy nation. At that time she was a pacifist, and had many bitter arguments with her childhood ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. MR. SOMERSET MAUGHAM the novelist has never shirked facing painful or disagreeable facts in human nature, even when they occur in characters whom on the whole he likes; and this trait stands him in good stead when, as now, he is writing a chapter of the history of the war. It is a sad chapter, and the chief actors are people to whom Mr. Maugham is deeply attached the French ...

... IN his Foreword to Polter geist Over England, Mr. Harry Price says: It has long been at the back of my mind that I ought to write a history of Poltergeists, be cause they attract me so. A strange attraction indeed; for a Poltergeist is anything but an attractive phenomenon. Mr. Price defines it as ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. MISS STELLA GIBBONS' new novel should rather be called The Bachelors, for Kenneth Fielding is only one of three marked down for eventual marriage. Hen-pecked by his. sister Constance, who runs and rules his house, diffident from the effect of a jilting long years ago, he has reached the age of forty-eight when Vartouhi, a refugee from a small imaginary Balkan country, ...