... 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- ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. MOST of Miss Delafield's novels can be divided into two categories: the comic and the sad. The comic are funnier than life usually is, and the sad are sadder. She sees the human lot through spectacles that are either rose-coloured or dark-tinted. Some times the colours get mixed, and sometimes we observe that traits in human nature which only serve to cause the first Miss ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. PROBABLY the most contro versial film produced in this country during our entire screen history is THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP. It will rouse pas sions and debates wherever it is shown. It will delight some people, and infuriate others. It will prove a knotty problem when the ques tion of export comes to be considered. Will it do good to our reputa tion abroad ...

... 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 ...

... EIGHT BOOKS FOR DIFFERENT MOODS Miss Mary Lavin's Masterly Short Stories Theatres of the U.S.S.R. The Experiences of a Soldier and a Pilot Three Novels and a Thriller -By Vernon Fane IN his preface to Miss Mary Lavin's book of short stories Lord Dunsany writes that he had no advice what ever to give her about literature; so I have only helped her with her punctuation, which is bad, and with ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. MISS EDITH SITWELL has made an antho logy of aphorisms re lating to poetry and the other arts, with annotations and comments by herself. She calls it A Poet's Notebook. It is a great privilege to be given a bouquet of blooms plucked from the garden of this most gifted poet, their hues and perfumes inter mingling to form an analogy or metaphor for the character of her own ...