... BETWEEN this war and the last there was a flood of books all following roughly the same pattern of Court memoirs, chroniques mildly scandaleuses and nostalgic echoes of the days when a Grand Duke really was a Grand Duke. I had read so I many of them some of them excellent, some of them repeti tive, few of them altogether negligible since they gave at the worst some kind of picture of a life ...

... MYSELF AT THE PICTURES A French Cavalcade By James Agate C. E. MONTAGUE laid it down that good work is never lost, while Arnold Bennett maintained that if the world held only one copy of a first-class book and that book were dropped in the Sahara Desert some traveller would discover it. Meaning, I have always thought, that if the traveller were an Englishman he would turn up his nose at the ...

... MYSELF AT THE PICTURES Long, Dull and Worthy By James Agate Shipbuilders (New Gallery) is a very long, very dull, very worthy, very dull, and very long film about shipbuilding on the Clyde. At the press show critics were presented with an elaborate four-leaved programme nearly a foot square, in which a tiny rivulet of text meandered through a meadow of navy-blue margin. This colossal programme ...

... Hamlet at the New Theatre By Horace Horsnell THE news that Robert Helpmann, who had already danced Hamlet, intended also to act him, fluttered the dovecots considerably. Would he? Could he? True he had already acted one Shakespearian role (Oberon at the Old Vic), and his spoken excerpt from Comos, in the delightful ballet he had recently based on Milton's young master-piece, vindicated his ...

... : Reviewed by Trevor Allen ALL I know about tanks from per sonal experience was gained when the Canadian Army here thought I'd look nice squirming through the hatch of the co-driver's seat, and took me for a ride in a Ram over some blasted heath. I hated the noise, but appreciated the fascination of the monster for the keen young driver and crew. That pride in mechanism runs through Mr. ...

... IN the summer of 1940 a young man sat down one evening to write a long letter to his two sons, the children who had left the day before for America, and whom he knew he might never see again. He wrote all through the night, and in the morning had finished a piece of work which was in. some sense a testament of faith. I ve written straight off, he told his wife, a long letter to the boys, ...

... . 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, ...

... The Two Children at the Arts By Horace Horsnell GOOD but short-tempered patriots no longer swear by the living Jingo. That bellicose bird took a fatal knock in the last war and, in so far as the theatre reflects public sentiment, is now as dead as the dodo. During the -last war few, if any, serious war plays were produced. We had the Byng Boys and some blithe camp followers to keep the ...

... Shakespeare at The. Scala By Horace Horsnell It takes all sorts to make an audience, especially an audience for Shakespeare. From the playgoer who is seeing, say, The Merchant of Venice in action for the first time, to the stall-fed critic who has seen good, bad, and indifferent productions of this star- spangled comedy ad nauseam, the range of spectators is wide. It includes those fond. ...

... Sweeter and Lower (Ambassadors) By Horace Horsnell IF you saw and enjoyed Sweet and Low, you will know what to expect, and should not be disappointed with this new edition of that downright revue, which follows in the footsteps of the' old.. It has the courage of its impudent convictions and the wit to express them. Its authors and artists assume the privilege of the social lampoonist to quiz ...

... fli¥7^li!mnwnVii^m THE most remarkable book of the week, as it is the most exciting and, in a sense, the most moving, is an unfinished one. Its author Lieut.-Commander Robert Hichens, D.S.O., D.S.C., was killed nearly a year ago on active service. His death was doublv a tragedv. since it was met by a stray shell after a hard action in which there had been no other casualties. He had been in ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. I HAVE not the smallest hesita tion in giving the top corner of this page this week to THE SHIP- BUILDERS (New Gallery)-- a story of the fall and rise of the Clyde shipyards, the grim years of pre-war idleness, and the full recovery with the out-break of war. The Shipbuilders is only a small picture, but it has a heart as big as St. Paul's. I suspect it cost very little ...