... II . By K. JOHN. THE PROMISE. carries on the story of China's war which began with Dragon Seed. The first part showed us how the scourge fell on house and hearth; what it meant to a prosperous farmer and his family in their village near Nanking; how it raged and slew and forged a steely re sistance, an indomitable hate. Always Ling Tan's house was the centre of the hideous tor nado and it ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. THE unheroic but not altogether unsympathe tic hero of Time Must Have a Stop is a schoolboy of seventeen, whose angelic appearance makes him look much younger. He is, how ever, obsessed by sex; and if we imagine that Mr. Aldous Huxley is going to spare us any detail of his amorous phantasies, we are much mis taken. Both Sebastian and, I think, the author are unduly ...

... . By JOHN RUSSELL. MR. NOEL COWARD and Mr. Terence Rattigan have, between them, succeeded in subtly discrediting a kind of play in which the English theatre had long excelled-- the comedy of good manners. Their world is one in which good manners no longer exist. Mr. Coward's plays, since 1925, have been comedies of bad manners, relieved with stretches of calculated sentiment. Sometimes these ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. IF you want a spring tonic-- and who doesn't?-- I sug gest that you go straight to the Odeon and see the film ver sion of Noel Coward's BLITHE SPIRIT. It is not a very, very good picture. It is hardly a picture at all in spite of a few simple camera tricks, such as flower-vases and-furniture moved by invisible agency, it is really a stage play photographed in Technicolor. ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. THE film version of Cronin's novel THE KEYS OF THE KINGDOM (Gaumont and Marble Arch Pavilion) is about a lot of things, including flood, fire, guerilla war, snobbish ness, illegitimacy, blood-poisoning and blood-poisoning and fishing, but is mostly about Roman Catholic missionary work in China forty years ago. Its intentions are obviously honourable, and it would be ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. TO most famous names, one's memory can at tach some shred of personality-- we recall that Demosthenes practised speak ing with pebbles in his mouth, that Nero fiddled while Rome burned, that Henry I. never smiled after the sinking of the White Ship. But to the name of Thomas Paine, so famous in his day and unforgotten still, I could not supply a single personal trait ...

... (T .* By KAYE HUGHES. LOOKING down that morning from the veranda at the beach brimful of pale-blue water, that served instead of a back garden for the row of summer bungalows, Miss Mellor had felt sharpen within her that unwonted sense of desperation. She had long ceased to question the destiny that required her to perform those duties which the old dame's family no longer had the time or the ...

... IN the line of Poets Laureate, the name of Robert, Southey is one of the best known and, as such things go, one of the most famous. An uninspiring lot, with Southey perhaps proving to be one of the dullest of them all. Maybe he suffers now from his contemporary juxtaposition with some of the brightest stars in English literature. As a Lake poet, he surely wore his successful laurels uneasily ...

... HAVING been brought up, as I still hold all the best young readers should be, on the works of Stephen Leacock, I read his HAPPY STORIES (Bodley Head. 7s. 6d.) with a particular wistfulness, since this was his last book, the very last collection of short stories and pieces from his pen. There is, however, nothing else that is mournful about this writing on the contrary, it is as light-hearted ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. MISS DOREEN WAL LACE has written a novel on the well- worn theme that physical attraction, especially between people in different stations in life, is not a good basis for a permanent relationship. This theme has often been written about, both in its larger and its lesser aspects, but Miss Wallace has breathed new life into it and given it a rural, agricultural setting on ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. EPIC poetry is neither written, nor read, as much as it was. There are many reasons for this, and one is that the novel has absorbed much of the motive power of the epic; if we want a story we read it in prose, because prose makes less demand on our attention than poetry. Or we can see it at the cinema or hear it on the wireless, methods of trans mission which make even ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. THE advertisers of RHAPSODY IN BLUE (War ner's) announce their new film as the jubi lant story of George Gershwin. In this they err, for if there is one. thing it isn't, it is jubilant. I suppose it is, up to a .point, the story of George Gershwin, although there are certain incidents that strike me as remarkably fishy. I take leave to doubt, for instance, that Gershwin ...