... PHON ETICAL FANCIES A Glasgow Publisher Has Ambitious Plans for the English Language From Scotland comes another villainous attack upon the English language, or, alternatively, another noble attempt to deal with the barbarities of our spelling. It all depends how you feel about phonetics. Mr. Peter D. Ridge- Beedle, a Glasgow publisher, has decided that the time has come to modify the English ...

... JN 1934 Mr- J- B. Priestley published English Journey a book which, in English social history, ranks in import ance with Cobbett's Rural Rides. In 1940 Mr. Priestley made some broadcasts, the effect of which on the population of these islands, and indeed upon the whole world, can only properly be assessed when the complete history of the war comes to be written. THREE HEN IN NEW SUITS ...

... DIM LIGHTS AND SOFT MUSIC The Virtuosity of Friedrich Anton Mesmer To have lived in Paris in 1778, the year that Jean-Jacques Rousseau died and which heralded the rise of Robes pierre, was exciting enough, but to add to the ferment in the capital, the Austrian doctor Friedrich Anton Mesmer arrived upon the scene with a new force to cure the ills of men, and, incidentally, to excite the ...

... GISSING AGAIN A New Edition of A Life's Morning, and Other Publications Briefly Reviewed George Gissing died in 1903. To-day, owing to the exigencies of war and a certain measure of neglect, his rather joyless novels are hard to get, and the author is known to a diminishing circle of readers. Gissing's early experiences in Manchester preoccupied him with poverty and its brutalising effects ...

... THE ANGELIC AVENGERS (Putnam. 10s. 6d.) is definitely an oddity, since in style and plot it has a marked resemblance to the Gothic literature of the past two centuries, and that is a literary manner that is now almost forgotten and almost never practised. The novel is, how ever, much more readable than the term implies, and has great force and even a queer kind of excitement. The publishers ...

... MR. PETER DRUCKER will be remembered as the author of The End of Economic Man. Published be fore the war, it was the chal lenge of an organised industry working under a democratic system of free enterprise to the then Nazi menace, and it set forth certain economic argu ments which postulated the eventual destruction of historical ideologies in the struggle with the powerful forces which were ...

... IF most of us were asked about the poems of Fran çois Villon we would assume, and quite properly, some know ledge of them, would place him as a French poet of the fifteenth century, and might even mur mur something about Oû sont les neiges d'antan? We might also refer to the lines written on a wish II 1 were tvmg and remember a good musical play on that theme which has been popular for the ...

... ONE would expect Field- Marshal Lord Mont gomery's writing to be crisp, factual and objective, and that, to an admirable degree, is exactly what it is in EL ALAMEIN TO THE RIVER SANGRO (Hutchinson. :5s.), his own account of the activities of the Eighth Army, during the nprinH whpn T rnmmanHpH +hp Army 13 August 1942 to 31 December 1943. If you are looking for any elements of showman ship in ...

... WHAT, in the space of a brief review, can one do with a study of one of the greatest of historians by so distinguished a contemporary historian as Bishop Mathew? That ACTON: THE FORMATIVE YEARS (Eyre and Spottiswoode. ios. 6d.) has all the qualities of a first-rate biography can be noted and appreciated on purely literary grounds. The esoterics of the historian are another thing, and, ...

... HISTORY, BIOGRAPHY AND HORTICULTURE American History Without Tears The Last Bourbon King A Peripatetic Raconteur A Garden Book to Cherish -By Vernon Fane JUDGING by the ever-increas ing clangour about recon struction and the post-war world, anybody would think that this war was as good as won. As a counter to the soothsayers of the Sunday and weekly Press, and the cohorts of wishful- thinking ...

... BALBOA to MUSICK The Story of Pacific Conquest, and Other Books Briefly Reviewed When Vasco Nunez de Balboa, that roystering, ambitious and avaricious soldier of fortune, that prince of stow aways, set out for the New World, it was with the object of evading his debts in Spain. What he found was the Pacific Ocean and gold enough to pay off many times over the creditors he had left behind in ...

... THE story of the beginnings of the wartime Ministry of Information is a fairly chequered one, full of storms, trials and tribulations, and nearly always at the centre of these tempests was to be found a censor, or censors. it tOOK nearly three years of total war tn arhipvp mme sort of balanced I policy at the Ministry, and it says a great deal for the personality of Rear-Admiral G. P. Thomson, ...