... . 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 ...

... . By L. Luard. (Nicholson and Watson 15s.) A good miscellany of Commander Luard's writings over many years about little ships. BOOKS IN BRIEF ...

... WHEN a novel is as good as Norman Collins's London Belongs to Me, probably the safest way of bringing it to the screen is to tick as closely as possible to the author's blue prints. Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, who Produced the new British film at the Leicester square, have done just this. To be sure, Mr. Collins saw his dramatis persona: om a rather longer viewpoint, and in more ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. THERE is going to be a lot of fuss over the screen treatment of Rachel Field's ALL THIS, AND HEAVEN TOO! (Warner), but per sonally I find myself on the side of the screen-writers. You will remember that Miss Field's long novel fell into two parts. The first dealt with the life of a nineteenth- century French governess in Paris. It described how Henriette Desportes, just ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. THERE was a time when a man of learning could make all knowledge his province. I imagine that in the seventeenth century it was still physically possible for one man to read all the books that had ever been written. How wonderful to know all there was to be known on any subject! Perhaps Francis Bacon was in that happy position. Shakespeare notoriously was not. Ben Jonson, ...

... . By John Connell. (Constable 21s.) IT would be a cruel and sweeping criticism to say of this book that it will be of interest chiefly to Stevensonians, but it would not be altogether untrue. Henley means little to the present age except as a man whose name appears in the index of almost every literary biography of his period. Of his own work no more than a few stanzas survive, and they have ...

... By K. JOHN. By Taylor Caldwell. BECAUSE the country is vast, remarks Taylor Caldwell, Americans have evolved an architecture on the same scale. One might add that in recent years the inspiration has been at work on some of their novelists. As applied to fiction, it may be a true analogy, or a case of Who drives fat oxen should himself be fat; either way, it seems responsible for a number of ...

... . By H. C. Branson (Bo dley Head 8s. 6 d.) This week's detective novel gets its title from one of the witches in Macbeth By the pricking of my thumbs Something wicked this way comes. And something very wicked had obviously been at work in New Paget (U.S.A.), for the local doctor had been shot apparently by a jealous husband who had afterwards murdered his own wife and com mitted suicide. ...

... . By Beverley Baxter, M.P., with Illustrations by Grant Macdonald. Hutchinson 21s.) The publishers describe this book as a selection from the weekly theatre criticisms which Mr. Baxter has now been contributing to the Evening Standard for more than six years. But it is much more' than that. Mr. Baxter's criticisms can be read, if the reader so wishes, for their verdicts on particular plays and ...

... 44 DAPHNE LAUREOLA IT is a Soho restaurant and in some disarray. The place, we gather, is being repaired. But who will worry? At Le Toil aux Pores the play must go on. Two spivs bargain in a corner. A bored man and woman argue. Four Cockneys twitter. Yorkshire and Poland are represented. And, enthroned in an alcove at the back, is a vision in shining satin: a lone diner who seems content to ...

... 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 ...

... THE LITERARY LOUNGER. By L. P. HARTLEY. CITY OF DEPARTURES. By John Brophy. IN his latest novel Mr. John Brophy has had the courage to vindicate priggishness. Most of his characters have streaks of priggishness and at least two of them are snobs. Thorneycroft and Beldon, who have made their way in the world, return to Liverpool, their home town-- the one from London, where the flying bombs ...