... Mr. Eric Gillett has edited Miss Ham's diary, which covers a period from 1783 to 1820, her childhood in Dorset, and her young womanhood there and in Ireland, where she lived for six years and acquired quite an Irish accent and became accustomed to Irish manners. So good were these last, particularly among the ALTHOUGH written in novel form, ISLAND IN THE SKY (Michael Joseph. 8s. 6d.) is ...

... Three Waltzes (Princes) FROM clogs to clogs, they say in Lancashire, is only a matter of three generations; and from Debrett to Hollywood apparently takes no longer, once a noble family has formed the habit of falling in love with actresses. Grandpapa, holding the Queen's commission in the Blues, is saved from a misalliance with the stage by the high tact of an aunt, Caroline, Duchess of ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. THE SMALL GENERAL tells of three genera tions of the Sung family, silk-growers and peas ant proprietors of an island in a large lake between Soochow and Hangchow. The father is an adept in the arts of graft and squeeze, and his son, the Small General-- so called because he had charge of a flotilla of three thousand ducks --takes after him. (The grandson has but a small ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. IF there is one school of American writers that I ad mire more than another, it is the bunch of boys and girls who make such entrancing stories out of their recollec tions of a perfectly normal childhood in the early 1000'S. We have the late Clarence Day, who wrote so beguilingly about Life With Father that, when he had used up his allotted space, he was forced to write ...

... MYSELF AT THE PICTURES Two Kinds Of Nonsense By James Agaie THERE was a great deal to be said for the old buck who liked the streets to be well aired before he took his morning walk. Similarly I am in favour of letting a film warm up to the extent of some twenty min utes or so. The advantages are obvious; you get rid of those boring credit-titles, I think they are called, telling you the name ...

... Madame Louise (Garrick) CAN any farce be called good that comes three times to the same climax? Perhaps not; but happily the drolls in the case, Mr. Alfred Drayton and Mr. Robertson Hare, are richer than the drollery invented for them and, as it turns out, they can well afford the defects of Mr. Vernon Sylvaine's Madame Louise. Some who share Mr. Drayton's pagan joy in the beauty of what the ...

... THE trouble with Mr. James Drawbell's NIGHT AND DAY (Hutchinson, 10s. 6d.) is that it is endlessly readable and endlessly quotable, and for the latter at least there is no room with present-day paper exigencies. The reading and re-reading part is much easier to deal with in fact, it 's a pleasure. The author has described this as a bedside I book, and in a sense that is apt, since it is a ...

... The New London Stage. Productions Reviewed by PHILIP PAGE AAADAME LOUISE (Garrick.) Although Charpentier's lovely opera Louise is likely to stick in my memory longer than this farce, I cannot refrain from handing lots of bouquets to its author, Mr. Vernon Sylvaine. For it is really funny. And there are surely few things in the world of the theatre more formidable than the creation of funny ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. THE STORY OF RAGGED ROBYN is that rare thing-- a novel with a flavour all its own. It is an allegorical, historical romance, the period being the late seventeenth century, the setting the stretch of country between Lincoln and York, but Mr. Oliver Onions does not try to make his history or geography pedantically accurate; rather he uses them as a device for getting away ...

... Reviewed by PHILIP PAGE GAY ROSALINDA (Palace).-- London is in for a very Straussy period just now. Even the music of the serious Strauss-- the great Richard-- has not been neglected; for the popular ballet Everyman is founded on three of his tone-poems. Gay Rosalinda is founded, of course, on the Fledermaus of jolly Johann, and there could be no better foundation. That foundation is the best ...

... WHEN a book continues to be read long after its author's death, it is gene rally because it expresses a new way of seeing life; its author is a pioneer, and like the scientist who discovers a new process, he enriches human knowledge and experience. Most ot tne autnors ana poets in any age, however, are con tent to use the discoveries of the pioneers, either in slightly new arrangements, which ...

... Groat Day (Playhouse) IT seems to be as difficult to learn from the stage as from life about women. Miss Clare Boothe wrote in the long ago a play with women as the only characters. She repre sented them as pampered cats with jungle red nails so sharp that a single scratch could inflict a mortal wound. Now comes Miss Lesley Storm with a piece in which all but three of the dozen characters ...