... 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 ...

... By Horace Horsnell Magic Carpet (Princes) MAGIC carpets are tricky aircraft. They fly, as you know, on a mixture of dreams and wishes. Transcending both time and space, their range is limited only by the imagination of the pilot. They take off at the word (or wish) of command. Once started, however, they are apt to get out of control, have a tendency to stall, and prefer a crash to a happy ...

... WAR BOOKS AND NEW NOVELS By Vernon Fane An Instructive, Cermany-froni'ivithin Account British Children Abroad The Life of a Roman Tribune A CatAovers' Classic A GOOD newspaperman on modern Germany is always worth reading, and Mr. Louis Lochner, chief of the Associated Press in Ber lin up to December 1941, is no exception to this rule. Mr. Lochner had fourteen years' experience of that country ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. t HANGMEN ALSO DIE (Tivoli and Marble Arch Pavi lion) tackles a subject that seems a little too big for its autho director, Fritz Lang, and his company of Hollywood artists. This is the story of the search for the assassin of Heydnch, the Hang man of Czechoslovakia, and, more grandiosely, the apotheosis of the soul of the Czech people. The pick of the soul of the Czech ...

... By Horace Horsnell Show Boat (Sloll): The Vagabond King (W inter Garden) MUSICAL comedy has its classics no less renowned than, opera. Several of them have recently been revived; three are now playing to full houses, and more are promised. Such renaissance, though unusual, is not merely a sign of the times. In these difficult days, when so much theatre talent is otherwise engaged or ...

... By Horace Horsnell Street and Low (Ambassadors) THIS witty revue has little in common with the lullaby from which its equivocal title is taken. Its sweetness is more tart, its lowness less balmy than the wind of the western sea. That is as it should be, for true revue is no respecter of sentiment. The dictionary defines it as a loosely constructed play or series of scenes or spectacles ...

... By Horace Horsnell Hi-de-Hi (Palace) SUCH a title as Hi-de-Hi suggests that the show itself will have unconventional features. And, sure enough, it has. Bud Flanagan sees to that. He is one of our most redoubtable outragers of dull decorum. More over, he has not merely a touch of that nature which makes a whole audience kin, but both hands (one Cockney, the other kosher) full. If ever chill ...

... A SELECTION FOR THE SERIOUS-MINDED -Bv Vernon Fane The Friendship of Keats and Severn The Nazis on Land and Sea Twelve Religious Plays by Dorothy Sayers Past and Present Lives and Loves THERE was once a man, an artist, who, while still very young, accom panied a dying friend abroad and tended him through all the rigours of a voyage in an early nineteenth-century sailing-ship, and through all ...

... 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 ...

... MYSELF AT THE PICTURES Open Letter to Sir Alexander Korda By James Agate DEAR Sir Alexander, First let me say how glad we are to see you in this country again. We have missed your imagination, your drive and your personality. But my purpose in writing to you is not to pay you compliments, however well deserved, but to make a suggestion. It is always said that criticism should be Constructive. ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. THE MINISTRY OF FEAR is a superior spy-story, written in the grand manner and re calling, in the author's treat ment of his subject, the murky intensity of Conrad's Secret Agent. Mr. Graham Greene's scene is London in the blitz, and among the minor characters the German bombs must be reckoned as not the least amiable. The human beings who decorate the stage are, for the ...

... BOOKS FOR ALL TASTES -By Vernon Fane Harold AJicolson Runs the Ancestral Gamut Mining and Farming in South America The Tactics of Bomber Command Lady Eleanor Smith's Romantic Gipsies Aunt Julie's Will AN Irish rebel, vintage 179S, ;s as good a subject as another for the kind of biography, en pantoufle, at which Mr. Harold Nicolson is demonstrably skilled. That Hamilton Rowan was his great- ...