... Reviewed by PHILIP PAGE TEN LITTLE NIGGERS.-- I would not say that this stage version, at the St. James's, of Agatha Christie's famous thriller thrills to any great extent. The whole idea-- a homicidal maniac invites ten guests to stay with him on a small island so that he can bump them off, one by one, more or less on the lines of the nursery rhyme-- is so utterly preposterous. Another ...

... INTIMATE STUDIES OF PEOPLE AND PLACES -By Vernon Fane The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle English Travel Through the Ages European Causerie, and a History of Portugal Short Stories, a Thriller and a Romance The World of Books- SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE once said of himself that he was the man in the street, and however much the reader of Sherlock Holmes and the Brigadier Gerard stories might ...

... A BIOGRAPHY and a SHELF-FUL of NOVELS -By Vernon Fane The Life of William Hazlitt A Story of Hamilton Palace A j\[eiu Lfovcl by Christopher M orley Two Books on Ballet, the Merchant Lfavy and Prester John MISS CATHERINE MAC DONALD MACLEAN has written an immense bio graphy, 630 pages long, of William Hazlitt. I mention its length because it seems to me that this is a case where length is not ...

... SOBER READING, in TRUTH and FICTION --By Vernon. Fane A Royal Engineer and the Phoney War Miss Carson M cCullers' Second T^ovel Mr: Bailey's Mr. Fortune Once Again Mr. Stephen Lister Among the Persuaders; Maniacs and Murder A WAR book in the exact sense of the word is SWORD OF BONE (Faber. 8s. 6d.); a story of the British Expeditionary Force in France from December 1939 until the evacuation ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. HOUSE BOUND is a war novel, as all fic tion that sets out to describe the contemporary scene must be, in some degree. Rose Fairlaw's role has hitherto been the passive one of anxiety for her children, who are just of an age to be closely in volved-- Mickie, her husband's son by his first marriage; Flora, the only child of her first marriage; and Tom, who belongs to her ...

... Reviewed by PHILIP PAGE The most important novelty is The Petrified Forest, at the Globe Theatre, which comes from America, where it had a long run. Mr. Robert Emmett Sherwood has never written a bad play yet, and this is almost (but, to my mind, not quite) his best. It deals with gangsters yet they are only incidental (though they shoot the hero dead), and it is not gangster drama, but a ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. IT is not every film director whose name be comes part of the currency of our language. We do not, for example, speak of a typical George B. Seitz situation, or de scribe an atmosphere as being genuine Sam Wood. Yet Mr. Seitz has been directing pictures for twenty-nine years, and Mr. Wood, whose record can be little, if any, shorter, has handled some of the biggest ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. I YOU can see-- if you can find it-- THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, the second film made by Orson Welles, whose Citizen Kane so delighted the intelligent filmgoer and so shocked the exhibitor and the complacent audiences. All I can tell you is that it is to be found somewhere in Acton, somewhere in if urn t uak, somewnere m Haves and Chingford, and somewhere in Brighton. ...

... WHEN GREECE DEFIED MUSSOLINI Compton Mackenzie's Historical Account of Greece's Struggle International Post-war Co-operation Cecil Beaton in the Near East. --By Vernon Fane NO one better than Mr. Compton Mackenzie understands the dramatic values of such a story as the Axis invasion of Greece in 1940, and few foreigners are better quali fied to write about the land of Greece. WIND OF FREEDOM ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. MR. JAMES AGATE claims to be the only ex-novelist who has rewritten his first book. He goes on: I am an ex novelist, and through sheer artistic integrity. When my third and last work of so- called fiction appeared in 1928 I had become enough of a critic to know that this was not novel-writing, but thinly- disguised autobiography. I stopped because my critical sense ...

... An Autobiography by Mrs. Bclloc Lowndes The Life of William Aficholson Soviet Russia from Within Modern Warfare and Modern Death The World of Books-- -By Vernon Fane A BOOK is an epistle written to un known friends, quotes Mrs. Belloc Lowndes at the opening of her new volume of autobio graphy. WHERE LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP DWELT (Macmillan. 12s. 6d.). The book is a sequel to a former volume ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. BETTE DAVIS'S directors are said to have said that for Bette to get going at her best she needs to play an intelligent female who is either wrong on wronged, against a background of earthquake, upper-class murder, or historical crisis. Personally, I like my Bette wrong and hopping mad a cross between Jezebel, Mildred of Human Bondage and Regina of The Little Foxes which may ...