... 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 ...

... 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, ...

... 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 ...

... MR. GERALD KERSH is among the very few new writers that this war has produced for whom one can confidently predict a distin guished literary career, perhaps even a brilliant one. He writes vividly, yet with restraint. He has an inspired economy of phrase, yet can convey a scene or a mood with stereoscopic clarity. And in any test or trial of such matters, he would get roughly 99 per cent, for ...