... THE first villain that I remember meeting in one of Miss I. Compton-Burnett's novels appears in ELDERS AND BETTERS (Gollancz. 9s. 6d.). She is Anna, the elder daughter of a large family, and, in the course of one of those placid, dateless existences which this author can best create, she manages to burn a will, frighten a woman quite literally to death and marry a spine less and rather ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. MORE than most novelists Miss Vicki Baum is preoccupied by love. Her chief characters are nearly always in love-- perhaps more in love than loving. It is the illness, the fever, she describes, rather than the emotional state it leaves be hind, the love-of the footlights rather than of the domestic hearth. But her characters, certainly the characters in her later books, ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. PLANET AND GLOW WORM, Miss Edith Sitwell's new antho logy, is described as a book for the sleepless, for those whose continual cares, fears, sorrows, dry brains drive rest away. The greatest of all works of literature in a certain kind, Miss Sitwell says, bring comfort to the heart, but they do not bring sleep they awaken the heart and the soul to what lies beyond ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. TIMELY is the word for THE WHITE CLIFFS OF DOVER (Em pire). There are other words for it. Sentimental is one of them. But timely is pro bably the fairest. The White Cliffs is one of the first films to make a deliberate, conscientious and, on the whole, successful attempt to explain the British people to the Americans, and the Americans to the British. Now that seems ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. IN 1873 Sir Ian Hamilton sailed to India to join the Gordon Highlanders. He was then twenty, and India remained his headquarters until 1898, when he was appointed Commandant to the School of Musketry at Hythe. It was Kipling's India, and Sir Ian, who was himself drawn to a literary career, has some interesting things to tell us about Kipling, whose early short story The ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. v The HEART OF A NATION, at the newly reopened Academy Cinema, tells the story of a single French family, from the Franco-Prussian War to the beginning of this one. The family home is in Montmartre, still a country village outside the capital when the Germans are .shelling Paris in 1871. The small boy who stands in a bread queue during that first siege grows up to be a ...

... MR. NICHOLAS MONSARRAT'S little books .about British corvettes in this war are fast becoming collectors' pieces. The first two were immensely good, and the third is a worthy sequel. If such things are ever possible again, 1 propose to have my three copies bound together as a lively record of one of our Navy s many gal lant activities. CORVETTE COMMAND (Cassell. 2s.) tells a story of progress ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. FAIR STOOD THE WIND FOR FRANCE is an escape story. Fly ing Officer John Franklin and his crew of four sergeants are returning from a raid in North Italy when the airscrew fails and the aeroplane crashes in Occupied France. Franklin's arm is badly cut the rest are unhurt. After one rebuff they are taken in by a farmer's family and hidden in a mill- house (the river plays ...

... MISS PAMELA HINKSON is a romantic, and her novel of English and French people living in India during the last decade or two has all the pearly tints and soft out lines of real romanticism. GOLDEN ROSE (Collins. 9s. 6d.) is primarily the story of two women and their loves; the Indian background, although indicated with the precision of someone who knows and loves the country, is only incidental ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. MAN, said Aristotle, is a political animal, and this is a fact that must be faced. Some poets-- more especially lyric and religious poets-- have ignored it and celebrated the relationship of man with God, or with him self, or with one other person; but the greatest, we have to admit, have included politics in their purview. Homer, Dante and Shakespeare were all inspired by ...

... -. By L. P. HARTLEY. BROOKE WHITTAKER'S father was a new-comer to the aristocracy of Hollywood, but she was its bright particular star and sufficiently sure of herself to keep that very eligible bache lor, Bob Warren, on a string. The fact that war had broken out in Europe as yet made little difference to her round of pleasures, but she had a serious side, and when some people in her set held ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. THE scene of Mrs. Weston's novel is Amritpore, a small civil station in India, and the action of the story covers the years between 1889 and the first World War. The subject-- but Indigo has several subjects, and it is not easy to say which looms largest, after India itself. There is the friendship be tween the three boys Jacques St. Remy, the Frenchman, whose mother owns ...