... Books: Ty? vie wed by ...

... 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, ...

... * R^ieWedJ,Un Trevor 1 ONCE I went on autumn exer cises in H. M.S. Renown. They sent me to the foretop in dark ened ship so that I should be smoked like a kipper and get the full crack of 15-inchers firing broadsides. In a gunroom versus wardroom rag a pack of snotties bore me down and debagged me. 1 tnerelore leel much more pious about our gallant Navy than Mr. C. S. Forester, who knows it ...

... : Reviewed by Trevor Allen WHEN I read a novel in these home-bound days I not only want a good story, I want to go places by proxy. Miss Katharine Brush's You Go Your Way (Cassell, 7s. 6d.) whisks me to the New York of cocktails, highballs, wisecracks, snappy dialogue, and divorce. Connie, you see, who wore a sleek black satin dress that loved her figure, had wilful ideas about marriage. ...

... : Reviewed by Trevor' zTfllen NO one in Cairo, Mr. Cecil Beaton implies, will ever need the Kipling epitaph: Here lies the fool who tried to hustle the East. He found the atmosphere of G.H.Q. not at all bracing-- rather like a reunion dinner of old schoolboys --and decided that no war leader should be encouraged to remain there for long, for Blimpism, plus the Cairene climate, were two of ...

... TO most people the name of Lourdes conveys something to do with miracu lous cures. A few may be able to go further and debate the miracles. Franz Werfel, a refugee from Germany, had managed to reach Lourdes in 1941 when new moves by Vichy and the Nazis seemed to seal his fate. Re vowed that if ever he reached America he would tell the world about Lourdes, and now he has magnificently fulfilled ...

... : Reviewed by ^*U Noel Thompson LET us start with something cheer ful. For this, and especially for those who know Yorkshire, I recommend Eric Knight's Sam Small Flies Again (Cassell, 8s. 6d.). The author explains that he wrote these short stories when he felt homesick in distant parts of the world and thought of Sam Small, the typical Yorkshireman in his own county's estimation with his ...

... Reviewed by Trevor Allen WHY do we, who live in an age of electric switches, bathrooms, and bombs, experience a nos talgic glow when we. read of houses illuminated throughout by oil lamps, where hip baths were laid out every evening in the bedrooms? Seventy lamps nad to be trimmed and filled everv morning at Denbies, the Dorking home of Sir Stephen Tallents's grandfather, built by his great ...