... . 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 ...

... MYSELF AT THE PICTURES A Witty Film By James Agate WHEN I was a boy I was entirely taken in and captivated by historical novels. I really believed that life in Pompeii was such as Lytton described, and in South American forests such as Kingsley pretended. That such were the exact words spoken by Ivanhoe to Rowena, by Hereward the Wake to the Last of the Barons. I believed, in a word, in the ...

... THERE is a really excellent idea in Miss Hester Chap man's new novel I WILL BE GOOD (Seeker and War burg. 10s. 6d.), which is set in the middle of the nineteenth century. The story opens in London, where Blanche Peverence is acclaimed as the outstanding romantic novelist of her day. She is a woman of outwardly matter-of-fact but inwardly romantic tempera- ment, whose writing and whose actions ...

... THERE are three kinds of people who may be inter ested in Miss Clare Sheridan's new volume of autobiography: those with an appreciation of the lovable beauty of the Sussex countryside; those inter ested in the author's spiritual views (which evidently bring her great comfort); and those interested in her art of sculpture. Yet in spite of these three angles from which the book may be approached ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. I SEE that the dis tributors of The Picture of Dorian Gray (Empire) are making quite a feature of their company's courage and gallantry in filming Oscar Wilde's most loved (and hated) story. IT COULDN'T BE MADE they cry in impassioned caps., and add But M.-G.-M. have made it, with coy modesty, in lower case. The perfect crime film, they say, for adult minds and strong ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. VICTORY week in the London cinemas was signalised by the appearance of two new films frohi major artists, both of which I shall insist on regarding as failures. The box office will probably contradict me peremp torily. I quite expect to see the crowds pouring into the Odeon to see Tallulah Bankhead in Ernst Lubitsch's CZARINA, and queues waiting outside the New Gallery to ...

... Reviewed by PHILIP PAGE THE SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL. --The Festival at Stratford-on-Avon is doing remarkably well this year. The beautiful town is crowded, and the fact that several of the hotels are closed for the duration does not make the search for accommodation any easier. I went down to see the birthday play A nlony and Cleopatra. Mr. Robert Atkins's pro ductions, considering his vast ...

... Perchance To Dream (London Hippodrome) MR. IVOR NOVELLO has become our No. 1 specialist in stage glamour. Give him a great stage and where is his rival in the gentle art of packing it with glamour and nothing but glamour? Emulators may be imagined losing their nerve when they notice that inspiration is running short of wit. They have not the secret of Mr. Novello's formula. He dispenses ...

... Lady From Edinburgh (Playhouse) THIS ill-made little comedy has charm. It is Barrie-esque without the Barrie magic: indeed it might well have been written by one of Barrie's heroines, let us say Maggie Shand, who came near to declaring (you remember): Charm is a sort of bloom on a play. Those that have it don't need to have anything else Lady From Edinburgh has Ihis mysterious, all ...

... Desert Rats (Adelphi) DESERT fighting, it has been said, was so fantastic that when you had got to know its ways, when your knees really were browned, the world that was not yellow and parched and scattered with booby traps and roving advanced columns, became hazy and unreal. Not a few who happened to be writing men as well as fighting men must have felt that somewhere in this strangeness ...