... l^^'-w HISTORY will have a place for the home front as well as battle-front chronicler. I can see posterity turning to Mr. James Wedgwood Draw- bell's All Change Here (Hutchinson, 10s. 6d.) to know what we did, thought, and talked about through these anxious days of war, for he is a lively, alert Pepys of journalism, netting the pass ing moment with the whoop of a boy after a butter fly. ...

... By Horace Horsnell Ten Little Niggers (St. James's) THE best nightmares do not always inspire the best table-talk. Indeed, as related at breakfast by their still quaking dreamers, they can be notoriously tedious. So is it with critical post-mortems on stage thrillers. In action these apocryphal affairs may excite or amuse by keeping the playgoer in thrilled suspense; but, like fireworks or ...

... By Horace Horsnell This Time It's Love (Comedy) ON the theatre bill of fare, love is to l'amour rather what roast beef is to bœuf à la mode. They have indeed such different connotations that, knowing this comedy to be an adaptation from the French, we are not tempted to take its title too literally. The original was written by Louis Verneuil, and its cool craftsmanship, freedom from ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. MRS. THIRKELL is one of the few writers who are able to make a satisfactory novel out of the material of wartime conditions as they affect the daily lives of ordinary English people. She does not specialise in air raids or evacuees, or Ministries or factories; still less does she venture on to the parade ground. or into the air or under the sea. She realises that such ...

... TU By Horace Horsnell An Ideal Husband (Westminster) MR. ROBERT DONAT'S first season as a theatre manager opened very auspici ously. His inaugural production not only promises well, but should pleasantly sur prise playgoers who may have carelessly assumed that Oscar Wilde was a one-play dramatist-- The Importance of Being Earnest first, and the rest nowhere. It re-establishes An Ideal Husband ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. WHEN Julien Duvivier made Un Carnet de Bal all those years ago in France, I'm afraid he started something he is going to find it very hard to finish --if he ever manages to finish it at all. For the success of Carnet impressed Hollywood with the notion that all Duvivier films ought to be made on the Carnet model that is to say, a series of short episodes, each with its ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. ST. TERESA OF AVILA and St. Thérèse, respec tively the Eagle and the Dove of Miss Sackville- West's title, make a vivid contrast; and the fact that they had certain things in common-- were both Carmelites, both saints and both named Teresa --only serves to make the contrast sharper. The .stamp of size is on everything that St. Teresa did and stood for. The patron saint of ...

... A Gripping Murder Story by Joseph Shearing Back Room Scientists Family Characterisation by Miss Barbara Goolden An Englishman in South America A Vivid Historical FJovcl -By Vernon Fane WHAT an extraordinarily good craftsman Mr. Joseph Shearing is, and how confidently-- and eagerly-- one opens each of his new books, each imaginative reconstruction of a crime that happened once, and of which ...

... -By Vernon Fane Philip Jordan's Day-to-Day Diary of Events in North Africa A History of the National Union of Journalists A Book of Stories by Ludwig Bemelmans, and Four New Books for Children THE blurb of JOR DAN'S TUNIS DIARY (Collins. ios. 6d.) de scribes Mr. Philip Jordan as the News Chronicle's famous war corre spondent. Unique amongst blurbs, which are not, as a rule, distinguished by ...

... Reviewed by PHILIP PAGE TEN LITTLE NIGGERS.-- I would not say that this stage version, at the St. James's, of Agatha Christie's famous thriller thrills to any great extent. The whole idea-- a homicidal maniac invites ten guests to stay with him on a small island so that he can bump them off, one by one, more or less on the lines of the nursery rhyme-- is so utterly preposterous. Another ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. MR. JAMES AGATE claims to be the only ex-novelist who has rewritten his first book. He goes on: I am an ex novelist, and through sheer artistic integrity. When my third and last work of so- called fiction appeared in 1928 I had become enough of a critic to know that this was not novel-writing, but thinly- disguised autobiography. I stopped because my critical sense ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. THERE is good news this week for all the good people who have written from time to time to ask, Can't we please have a revival of 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs'? Beauti fully in time for the Christmas holidays, the most beloved of all Disney films comes back to the New Gallery. I make it my Number One item on this page, because I feel sure it will be the Number One ...