... Birds in Britain, by Frances Pitt Macmillan and Co. 25 s.). Books on birds, as Miss Pitt admits in her preface, are legion, but as she has the happy gift of imparting natural history knowledge to the amateur in far more readable form than most, room will undoubtedly be found for this work on many a shelf. In addition to information on the species, there are chapters on the bird's place in ...

... Fruit Farming,. Young Farmers' GluD LSooklet no. 21, puDiisned Dy Evans Brothers Ltd. at is. 6 d. This does not seem quite up to the stan dard of the pre-war handbooks of the series. The trouble is that to try to cover in 48 pages fruit- farming from suitable soils to methods of grading and storing is attempting too much to be really helpful. It seems that this subject might have been dealt ...

... : Dr. Gyril D. Darlington, F.R.S., has edited the whole of the John Innes Leaflets issued by the Institution to date, including the latest No. 6 on seed production. The interest shown in composts, soil sterilisation, the fertility rules in fruit planting and other subjects studied by horticulturalists is shown by the fact that 60,000 copies of the five leaflets were sold during the war. This ...

... . 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 ...