... Russia Stalin's Complex Land Caucasus Journey Lions are not like That The Wives of the R.A.F. An Analysis of Invasion: Reds, Pinks and Russians --By Vernon Fane BY some extraordinary felicity of timing, Mr. George Sava has only now published his account of a journey made in 1918 from Baku to Tiflis across the mountains of the Caucasus. His VALLEY OF FOR GOTTEN PEOPLE (Faber and Faber. 12s. 6d. ...

... Two Shows Reviewed by Philip Page IT is doubtful whether in the history of the musical corned}' stage there has been a better quartet of fun-makers than Messrs. Arthur Riscoe, Sydney Howard and Richard Hearne and Miss Vera Pearce. Their team work in Fun and Games, the rollicking enter tainment just launched at the Princes Theatre, is perfect, and team-work here is one of the things that ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. MISS EDITH SITWELL'S new anthology of poems, Look! the Sun, is intended, she tells us, primarily for children; but, she adds, readers of all ages will, I hope, derive happiness from it. This raises the fascinating question, what is it in poetry that children like? Should we, for instance, expect them to like the poetry of Wordsworth, who himself reverenced children, as ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. MAN HUNT' (Odeon) is a Hollywood film which will be enormously successful, sweepingly popular and about which I feel a certain amount of personal bitterness. The simple fact is, that this film ought to have been made in England. It has just the qualities of melodrama, plus realism and the sporting chance, that an English director such as Carol Reed could have handled to ...

... NOVELS OF MODERN TIMES Hemingway and the Preacher -Poet The Lady in the Fur Coat Bernard T^ewmans Papa Pontivy -By Vernon Fane THE title of the first full-length novel which Ernest Heming way has published for ten years, FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS (Cape. 9s.), is a quotation from John Donne. The book has caused a sensation in America, where, according to the bookselling jour nals, it has busted ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. THIS week it is my pleasant task to welcome a new series, Britain in Pic tures; or, to be more accurate, three new series, for, besides Britain, the Penns-in-the- Rocks Press are publishing illustrated commentaries on the countries of the British Empire (The British Commonwealth in Pictures), and illustrated anthologies of the English poets The English Poets in tures). ...

... A CLASSIC, SATIRE, WAR AND TRAVEL Thomas Hardy Illustrated The Crazmess of Thurber How France Fell Was Columbus a Jew Another Book on Ballet -By Vernon Fane PRAISE be to whoever thought of celebrating the centenary of Thomas Hardy's birth by an edition of UNDER THE GREEN WOOD TREE: OR THE MELLSTOCK QUIRE, illus trated by Claire Leighton (Macmillan. 12s. 6d.). I should like to think it was Miss ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. MR. FORREST REID'S criticism of books is, I suppose, a little old fashioned; he does not use terms such as integral or organic, and his attitude of mind is relaxed and meditative rather than tense and twanging. This is not because some of the essays collected in Retrospective Adventures were written a good many years ago, several in the nineteen- twenties and one or two ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. CHILDHOOD and youth against a background of the herring fishery in the North of Scotland: these are the main ingredients in Mr. Neil Gunn's new novel The Silver Darlings. He has already shown himself the novelist-- and the poet-- of romantic, lyrical, day-dreaming adolescence, and here these qualities are heightened by an historical setting. The story begins lust before ...

... By Herbert Farjeon Dear Brutus (Globe) BEFORE the curtain has been up at the Globe Theatre for (is it?) ten seconds, live female guests have made their appear ance in the drawing-room of Lob's house in the country, these five female guests being (in alphabetical order of surnames) Zena Dare, Ursula Jeans, Mary Jerrold, Margaret Rawl ings and Nora Swinburne, with Roger Livesey as butler in ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. IF a novel is to be of one tenor, one mood, all the way through, I would rather it were grave than gay. Better still, let the elements be mixed, as they are in the work of the great Victorian novelists and as they are in life. Nearly all art; except music, abhors a change of mood, which may so easily destroy the unity on which its final effect depends it tends to prefer ...

... o . By C. A. LEJEUNE. ONE of the most strongly marked traits of the typical film execu tive is a strange, repetitive urge. What he has done once he must do again. Once a star has made a success of a particular type of story he rushes to give him another of exactly the same type. If one costume picture has made a hit, then obviously a hundred more costume pictures will make exactly a hundred ...