... Reviewed by Trevor Allen DO you know Athens in spring, when the nightingales sing under the stars? The magic of Theocritus is in the air, and the bees draw honey from the moonlight. So muses M. Andre Michalopoulos, crossing the Zappeion Gardens, under eucalyptus trees and cypresses, to broadcast to England a few nights before the Germans marched in and he sailed for Crete in a yacht which ...

... Two Bio- novels COME critics say that the lives of celebrated i ^people should not be written in novel form. I cannot see why, provided the dialogue s S is probable and known facts are not falsified. In any case, dialogue has to be projected for S S stage, radio, and film, and romantic -stories like Chopin's and George Sand's are almost S S novels already too tempting to resist; where hundreds ...

... : fi ftr^ Reviewed by fifl Trevor^llen SUPPOSE you know, intimately, just one lovable young man who has been sacrificed in this war. Isn't his loss, while the instigators of that war go on living, a challenge to all your fundamental beliefs in God and the justice of God, and your spiritual faiths in the future? Mr. Rom Landau thinks so. His Letter to Andrew (Faber, 8s. 6d.) is addressed to a ...

... Books Reviewed by Noel Thompson 1 OUR gallant sailors are only ordinary human beings and hate to be looked on as a race apart. That is the message of Gilbert Hackforth- Jones in his book of short stories about the navy, which he has called One-One-One (Hodder and Stoughton, 7s. 6d.). But the more he tries to show they are ordinary, the more, to me, he shows them extraordinary. Readers of ...

... MR. RICHARD LLEWELLYN'S successor to How Green Was My Valley None But The Lonely Heart (Michael Joseph, 10s. 6d.) is not c only about Cockneys; it is written throughout in Cockney idiom. Young S Ernie Mott, a artist very near, wants to achieve Tate Gallery eminence c like his father; but his widowed ma runs a furniture shop Kingsland Road way, with shoplifting and receiving as sidelines, ...