... TU By Horace Horsnell Old Chelsea (Prince's) I OLD times, sentimentally approached, are apt to display ye olde veneer; and there are writers whose quality may be judged by their attitude to the past. This may be patronising, which is bad; snobbish, which is worse, or just plumb whimsical, which but it is late in the day to flog that poor lade, the musical-comedy libretto. Good ness knows ...

... By Horace Horsnell Halfway to Heaven (Princes) I AM not on very easy terms with the super natural. Professors of the black arts would regard me as an outsider. Even amateur fortune-tellers look at me askance, and palm ists snub, when I inquire sympathetically into the craft of the arts they practise. So that although I approached them with friendly curiosity and an open mind, perhaps I am not ...

... By Horace Horsnell ITar and Peace (Phainix) TOLSTOY'S War and Peace is a long story, epic in scope and quality. It has lately suffered a popular English boom. This was provoked by our general interest in Russia and by the fateful parallel between Napoleon's 1812, and the present Nazi campaigns. A radio adaptation of the book was recently broadcast; a film is projected, and a stage play was ...

... By Horace Horsnell Acacia Avenue (Vaudeville) SOMEDAY the happy breeds of Balham, Tooting, and the lands beyond the five- mile radius will rise in revolt, not against their conditions, but against flippant exposure on the stage. The tocsin will be sounded on Shooters Hill, the standard raised on Clapham Common, Wandsworth will embody its militia, Blackheath raise levies, and storm troops ...

... Playbill Looks at the Shows What Every Woman Knows (Lyric). THIS is the second of the wartime Barrie revivals (apart from Peter Pan), and although it dates a bit-- it is thirty-five years old-- it is, I think, a better play than Dear Brutus. It is. more direct, it has more humour, and it is free from the more whimsical type of sentimen tality. True, it takes a long time to get to the ...

... 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 ...

... Reviewed by PHILIP PAGE TT//S TIME IT'S LOVE (Comedy).-- How that amusing Frenchman, Louis Verneuil, ever came to write a quarter of a centurv ago so dull a plav as this, and whv two clever English people have taken the trouble to translate it, I find a bit of a mystery. The translation is a more than impossible job of work, and that is why, coupled with some excellent acting the evening was ...

... -By Vernon Fane Lion Feuchtwanger 's Story of Nazi Germany Ach-ack and a Kentish Village Murder in Pre-war Austria The Ingredients of a Chinese Puzzle THE new Feuchtwanger novel evokes this author's usual atmosphere of ugly splendour and macabre Gothic intrigue. It is a melodrama of Nazi Germany before this war, and tells the story of two men who are shown as having a dubious influence over ...

... : 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 ...