... . By L. P. HARTLEY. IN the past Miss Elizabeth Bowen's stories-- the short stories, perhaps, even more than the novels-- have been uneasy with presage of disaster, a presage that is sometimes fulfilled, but more often hangs about, a diffused sense of ner vous apprehension, poisoning the air. One felt, then, that this omnipresent intuition of danger came rather from some bias of the author's ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. THERE'S this to be said about the anti-- Nazi films that have been filling our theatres of late with such aban don-- they have thrown up some re markably good acting. Even if you are as tired as I am of screen swastikas, and storm troopers, and concentration camps, you must admit that there is something about their tense atmosphere that seems to bring out the best in young ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. THE CANYON is a story of adolescence; Californian adolescence, which means that the symp toms are much aggravated. Whereas ordinary schoolboys in England, and probably in New England too, are content with ringleaders of only moderate wickedness, with inflicting on each other tor tures from which recovery is possible at the most in a few hours (though the wound to the ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. ALTHOUGH ARISE, MY LOVE (Carl ton) involves a foreign correspondent and is set against a background of European war, it shows us no battle scenes, and is mainly bright, light comedy. For which no one is more grateful than your reviewer. This foreign correspondent theme, all the rage in fiction after the last war, is getting increasingly fashionable in Holly wood films. ...

... WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE INDUSTRIAL ARMY? Mr. Trevor Evans's Disclosures -Mr. Bevin versus Compulsion -By Vernon Fane IN spite of its fatuous title, STRANGE FIGHTERS, WE BRITISH! (Robert Hale 3s. 6d.) is a serious work on a serious subject. Mr. Trevor Evans, who is the industrial correspondent of a great news paper, has surveyed the war effort and commits himself to the opinion that we are ...

... All Clare on the Western Front A. G. Street Goes Back to the Farm; The Subtleties of Kathleen Coyle -By Vernon Fane AS I was reading Miss Clare Boothe's EUROPEAN SPRING (Hamish Hamilton. 10s. 6d.), the news came through that President Roosevelt had signed the Lease and Lend Bill. On page 32 of that book I found this passage: Isolation is the unwelcome compliment America pays the British Navy. ...

... By PHILIP PAGE WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE and Noel Coward-- no one, at any rate, will cavil at my putting them in that order-- have been the prevailing influences in the London theatre in the last few weeks, and both have certainly prevailed. What, indeed, could be more persuasive nowadays than the final lines of King John, revived by the Old Vic company at the New Theatre? This England never did, ...

... Books: Tyroiewed by ...

... : R eviewed By i Noel Thompson WHEN an authoress chooses a subject, writes a novel which draws the moral she wishes to make, and then finds just as she completes it that what she has written is coming true, she has every reason to feel pleased at her perspicacity even if she worries as to whether she will be believed that the book was written before the events. Storm Jameson wanted to write ...

... Books: R eviewed by Noel Thompson I HAVE written elsewhere on this page on how war came to the English countryside. M. Dragomir, a Polish civil servant, now an exile in America, has told in It Started in Poland (Faber and Faber, 8s. 6d.) a vivid personal story of how the blitzkrieg hit Poland. He des cribes those harrowmg days towards the end of August, 1939, the first few days of fighting, ...

... -- I DO not know a better book than Joy Homer's Dawn Watch in China (Collins, 12s. 6d.). Here was a girl who spent fourteen months not only touring the Chinese provinces, but also the Japanese areas. She travelled over all except three of the provinces, covered 1,200 miles on a truck, lived in caves, was in numerous air raids, visited the front line trenches, met generals and coolies alike, ...

... : Reviewed by Noel Thompson THIS month out of twelve books which I have picked for review, all except two are biographies, dramatised lives of real characters, or based on actual facts, while the two exceptions are crime books with an American background. And only one has anything to do with the war. Does that mean that times are too real for our fiction writers? It is too much, I fear, to ...