... Enterprise in Bayswater The Scarlet Pimpernel (Threshold Matinees only) DRAMA, for the moment, just does not exist in the West End, but the plucky little Threshold Theatre, down Bays water way, has come to the fore with a more than adequate revival of that hoary favourite, The Scarlet Pimpernel. The choice strikes me as odd, for this tale of the French Revolu tion, which brings back memories ...

... DOOKS: Reviewed by Noel Thompson TWO novels by women head the list of recently published books, and while they are worlds apart geographically, one being set in England and the other in America, in accuracy of characterisation and biting perception they are akin. Monica Dickens, a great granddaughter of Charles Dickens, has chosen in her first novel to write about a girl of presumably ...

... IN these days people are turning to books which will take them out of themselves and away from their surroundings for a few happy hours. Here are three which have a setting far away from the war but which none the less are full of excitement. High Sierra by W. R. Burnett (Heinemann, 8s.) is the story of an American gangster. The author is an obvious expert on his subject, and the tale ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. MODERN poetry does not as a rule wear its meaning on its sleeve any more than it wears its heart; in some cases both take a lot of finding. One reason why we welcome this new book of poems by Mr. Herbert Asquith, Youth in the Skies, is that here heart and mean ing are discernible at a glance. Meaning is not like a jewel, valuable in proportion to the difficulty of finding ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. AS one who believes that screen children, as a race, should be strangled at birth, I am delighted to have found a screen child this week who is both talented and appealing. Her name is Betty Brewer, her age is thirteen, and the film in which she appears is RANGERS OF FORTUNE (Plaza). This, the only new film of the week, is a roystering melodrama of the Great South-West in ...

... THE LAST OF THE BENSON REMINISCENCES Final Edition Completes the Memoirs of the Late E. F. Benson By Vernon Fane WITH the sadly prophetic title of FINAL EDITION (Collins, 15s.), the late E. F. Benson has rounded off his reminiscences which began in As We Were, and which were continued in As We Are. I go back, he says, to a day of early summer in the year 1900, when first the green front ...

... 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 ...

... AN OUTSTANDING WAR-TIME NOVEL Nevil Shute's Stirring Tale of the R.A.F. The Love Story of Goethe and Lofte Kestner Victorian Hilarity and Stuart Intrigue -By Vernon Fane IT is time the British public sat up and took notice of Mr. Nevil Shute. Not long after Munich, and just about the time when this country was becoming A. R. P.-conscious, a novel was published called What Happened to the ...

... 7Z£L_ Jane at Hollywood By James Agate I AM not of the company which hold that great novels are sacrosanct and must not be transferred to the screen. It all depends upon the novel. Where, as in the case of Dumas and Hugo, the book is nine tenths action the very best results may be obtained. Conversely, the kind of novel which is eminently unfilmable is the introspective sort, or the analytical ...

... Performing on the Air By Herbert Farjeon J/i, Cans! and Carlisle Express (B.B.C.) THE Stuff to Give the Troops, of which we heard so much during the last war, has, with the advent of wireless and the present war, become the Stuff to Give the Forces, who, as you may have gathered, are given a programme of their own by the British Broadcasting Corporation; but while this is, no doubt, a well ...

... TlC. _ English or French By James Agate ONE of my friends, a musical critic and a brilliant fellow, has one excessively annoying fault. He will never let you express admiration for a performance of some thing or other without telling you that he has seen the work performed better. Do you tell him that you enjoyed, say, Rosenkavalier at Sadler's Wells? He will tell you of better soloists and a ...

... The Theatre Goes Rural A Lonsdale Comedy in an Old Barn in Buckinghamshire Although thirty-three out of fifty theatres and music halls in London have applied for renewal of their L.C.C. licences, barely half a dozen of them are at the moment 44 in com mission. One show which might have been rehearsing itself to a dark-sheeted audi torium but instead was being played through and through in a ...