... 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, ...

... . Starred by iCThe Sketch *=highest value * WATCH ON THE RHINE (Aldwych). Diana Wynyard, Anton Walbrook, Athene Seyler, Margar- etta Scott. Anti-Nazis in U.S. 44 FLARE PATH (Apollo). R.A.F. ops. Adrianne Allen. 44 BLITHE SPIRIT (Duchess). Noel Coward's play. Kay Ham mond, Cecil Parker, Irene Browne. PINK STRING AND SEALING WAX (Duke of York's). 1880 Brighton comedy. Iris Hoey, Dorothy ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. NOSTALIGIA for the past is a very prevalent mood, not only among, literary men; and Mr. James Pope-Hennessy yields himself to it with melancholy and grace. His West Indian Summer is an account of the island of Trinidad seen through a temperament-- in fact, through several temperaments --and through the mists, vary ing in density, of several pasts. He himself was there in ...

... A Foreign Correspondent at Large The Eagle Squadron of the R.A.F. The Lives of William and Mary Bonaparte and the Modern Parallel By Vernon Fane THERE is a genus of news paper-men called foreign correspondents who have, in the last ten years, reached a peculiar eminence of their own. Of these, one of the best known is Mr. Vincent Sheean, whose reputation is of an early 1930's vintage, and ...

... By Horace Horsnell The Dark River (Whitehall) ABSENCE, they say, makes the heart grow fonder, and exile deepens the longing for home. Subtler, more deeply hidden longings, they tell us, are a common malady. These may range from unconscious desire to return to carefree childhood, to regret for more adult havens of lost happiness and content. Appreciating the dramatic possibilities ol such a ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. DANCE of the Years is the life (and death) story of J ames Galantry, son of an East Anglian squire. Old Galantry had married again, late in life; his second wife was a gypsy, and this accident of parentage gave James a sense of apartness, not only from his step-relations, but from the whole world. l his cir cumstance, together with the historical setting of Miss Mar gery ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. YOU will have noticed an in creasing ten dency of late to make films about groups of people-- marines, A.T.S. girls, munition workers, nurses of Bataan. In the old days, it used to be considered sufficient for one beautiful girl to have one love-story in each film. Nowadays we study the emotional problems of half-a-dozen in a batch. Whether it is just reaction, or the ...

... Reviewed by PHILIP PAGE PANAMA HATTIE.-- Rarely have I heard such witless dialogue as there is in this Cole Porter musical at the Piccadilly; every one was talking through his, or her, Panama hattie, and most of them seemed to need a microphone (and in one case a megaphone as well) in order to enable them to do it. Cole Porter's tunes are well below his usual level; indeed, the only music ...

... THE BEST BOOKS OF THE WEEK -Bv Vernon Fane M lie. Curie as a War Correspondent Biographical Essays of Two Saints The Story of a Bomber Pilot The Fate of the Islanders of Bonin MLLE. EVE CURIE, besides being the biographer of her great mother, is a war corre spondent of no mean ability. Her JOURNEY AMONG WAR RIORS (Heinemann. 15s.) is a brilliantly written journal of her experiences during the ...

... --By Vernon Fane Victorian Influence in the West Indies An Englishman from Tokyo A Character Study of Raleigh A Fine Record of the Royal A[avy The Batsford Centenary CASHEL, in Mr. James Hope Hennessy's WEST INDIAN SUMMER (Batsford. 12s. 6d.), was aide-de-camp to the Governor of Trinidad in 1939. From the boredoms of official life he turned to a library of books written by eminent visi tors to ...

... By Horace Horsnell Arc tie Triomphe (Plicenix) MR. IVOR NOVELLO'S latest play is un deniably canonical. No one could mis take it for a work by Noel Coward, Wagner, or Gilbert and Sullivan. Its amiable features-- musical, sentimental and dramatic-- are as clearly his own as those of Hamlet, say, are Shakespearean, or the unwinking regard of the waxen celebrities of the Marylebone Road is ...

... TU By Horace Horsnell She Follows Me About (Garrick) MR. BEN TRAVERS calls his new play a comedy, and he may be right. Con noisseurs of farce, however, whom he has generously catered for in the past, need not feel snubbed on that account. After all, what's in a name, when the author of Rookery Nook. Thark, and other redoubtable riots does the christening? What was there is here. Common sense ...