... By Herbert Farjeon r Distant Point (Westminster) THIS rather ingenuous Communist play, written by Alexander Afinogenev (whose death in a Moscow air-raid was announ ced last week) and adapted by Hubert Griffith), has a certain charm which would have been a good deal more charming had the treatment been a good deal less partisan; but the author is so busy making a case for life under the Soviets ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. THE New Gallery, I suppose, will again be the Mecca of parents with children to entertain these Christmas holi days. The new Disney Christmas annual is out, and it's called DUMBO, and proves to be the simple, gaudy, straightforward sort of thing that children expect from Disney, without any disturbing innovations. Dumbo is a baby elephant, an innocent, blue-eyed baby born ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. AS Mr. Epstein sculpts, so does he write, without fear and, I was going to add, without favour; but this would not be entirely true. Disguise the fact as he may, every man is his own favourite, and Mr. Epstein, besides being his own biographer, is also his own apologist, or, it would be fairer to say, the apologist of his art. Ut himself he writes with admirable ...

... . Kelly's Handbook to the Titled, Landed and Official Classes for 1941 has just been published. It is one of the most useful of all books of reference, as it is a handy volume, which occupies a small amount of space 011 the writing-desk, and yet it contains over 30,000 biographies arranged in alphabetical order. Many of these will not be found in other reference books, as Kelly's includes not ...

... By Herbert Farjeon Up and Doing (Saville) TAKING it by and large, the impression left on me by this revue, which has now returned to the revivified Saville, was extremely gay and agreeable. Taking it item by item, what I felt was:-- (1) Opening, The Shop, smart, bright, brisk, auspicious as to chorus, principals and costumes, a good get-away. (2) I've Got You Where I Want You boy-and-girl ...

... By Herbert Farjeon New Faces (Apollo) RE-ENTER New Faces. With some new faces and some (the best of them) not so new. With some fresh material and some (again the best of it) not so fresh. And the same lively, up-and-growing, star-in-the making, cheerful, clever air of well-drilled irresponsibility that proved so popular a year ago. This revue, which is much better than most, departed for the ...

... Lady Behave (His Majesty's) By Herbert Farjeon IT is some time since we last met the heroine who, being an archduchess or a million airess or something similarly unspiritually dazzling, rejects the gifts with which fortune has blessed her and temporarily swaps hats with her maid because she wants to be loved for herself alone. She became, I suppose, a bit of a laughing-stock, or, if not a ...

... --By Vernon Fane Somerset Maugham's New Tale The Golden Wall Street Touch A Novel of Suffolk and New England Neil Gunns Silver Darlings MR. SOMERSET MAUGHAM, having vowed to write no more, has just published a new book, UP AT THE VILLA (Heine- mann. 6s.). It is too short to be called a novel, and too long to be a short story; in other words, it is the kind of book which publishers are supposed ...

... Nineteenth-Century St. Petersburg Sacheverell Sitwell's Diversion The Swashbuckling Trelawny Another Last to Leave Paris Book Tennis, Cocktails, Love and War -By Vernon Fane THE Wellsian mantle of pro phecy having descended upon the astrologers of the Sun day newspapers with a sickening thud, it would be unwise to assume that anyone out of touch with these dubious sources would have ...

... By PHILIP PAGE ALL the principal ladies-- and there were four of them-- in Lady, Behave (His Majesty's Theatre), a musical-comedy, behaved immaculately, except for occasional bursts of ill-temper, rendered necessary by the plot, or possibly the lack of it. In the case of the chief of the bunch, Miss Sally Gray, so pretty does she look when she is angry that it must be well worth while having a ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. PROCEED, SERGEANT LAMB is a sequel to the author's Ser geant Lamb of the 9th, and it carries Lamb's story to the end of the War of American Independence. He fought in six battles; Guildford Court House was the last. Yet [he observes] I was by no means yet at the end of my wanderings, and I may affirm without boasting or fear of contradiction that, before I had done, the ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. THE Prime Minister of THE PRIME MINISTER, at Warner's Theatre this week, is not the one that most people will expect from the title, but Benjamin Disraeli. Or, rather. three Mr. Disraelis, covering all sixty of those glorious vears that Miss Neagle has told us so much about.- Young Mr. Disraeli looking like Mr. John Gielgud. Middle-aged Mr. Disraeli looking like Mr. ...