... Cavalcade of Mystery (Aldwych) By Herbert Farjeon As a critic of magic I can boast no great pretensions. I must, in fact, confess myself in this respect a simpleton and a booby, my education as to goldfish, rabbits and vanishing ladies having been sadly neglected. For though my parents took me regularly to see Henry Irving and Ada Rehan and Charles Wyndham and Johnnie Toole from the age of ...

... Russian Opera Mussorgsky's Sorotchintsi Fair at the Savoy Theatre The merrymakers of Sorotchintsi a Ukrainian village, group themselves round the gipsy fortune-teller Lipa Balmont), whose tale of a 44 pig-headed devil in a red coat plays its part in the gay, inconsequent story Mussorgsky's comic opera, Sorotchintsi Fair, which is based on a story of Gogol, who himself was a native of ...

... : Reviewed by Noel Thompson IT must be almost a burden to have written a book of which five million copies have been sold. Henceforth in comparison everything you produce must seem puny. Erich Maria Remarque wrote All Quiet On The Western Front and caught the tide of anti-war feeling. His latest book Flotsam (Hutchinson, 9s. 6d.) deals with the fate of those people without a passport or ...

... Vivid Accounts of the Nazi Scourge William L. Shirer's Berlin Diary The Polish Angle A Professor Witnesses the Subjugation of Tforway A Third Issue of Modern Reading -By Vernon Fane I WONDER how many people could have forecast with any accuracy the course that radio would take in this war. By that I do not mean the develop ment of radiolocation and all those kind of things, but of ordinary ...

... . 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 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 ...

... By Herbert Farjeon Sorotchintsi Fair Savoy I FOR this ambitious venture at the Savoy Theatre, Russia's entry into the war is mainly responsible. Before the curtain rose on the first performance, the London Symphony Orchestra played God Save the King and the International, and the whole of the audience rose to its feet and remained standing throughout both pieces. When the curtain fell at ...

... An Outstanding Wartime Work -By Vernon Fane A Great Travel by Maurice Hindus Tragedy on the Farm Stephen Lister's Cafe Society A Chronicle of Chinese Life IN spite of the fuss that was made of Ernest Heming way's last novel, I doubt whether a work of fiction with any lasting value has been pro duced during the past three years. Contemporary literature has not been enriched by any thing during ...

... By Herbert Farjeon Forty-eight Hours' Leave (Apollo) THE chief difficulty confronting Mr. James Parish, the author of this comedy, would seem to have been to make the principal character nice enough for a leading lady like Miss Irene Vanbrugh to play; for Miss Vanbrugh is one of those actresses who, like Miss Marie Tempest, consistently demands sympathy. To make out a good case for Lady ...

... Two Views on Tife TWO books about artists, one written by a woman who combined married life with her career, and the other dealing entirely with the Bohemian side in Paris provide an interesting contrast and also considerable parallels. steua oowen was Dorn m Australia ana orougnt up in a rather Victorian atmosphere which for years she could not forget. In Drawn from Life (Collins, 12s. 6d.) ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. THE most startling film-- with the possible excep tion of Our Town-- to come out of America since the Coward- Hecht-McArthur Scoundrel is in- town this week. The title is CITIZEN KANE, and you can, and should, see it at the Gaumont. It is the brain-child and hand-work of twenty-six-year-old American Orson Welles, who goes in for .startling things. Welles, as you may ...