... Books Reviewed by Trevor Allen THREE novels this month turn back the pages of history -- when Napoleon's coffin was opened at St. Helena twenty-five years after his death, under his right hand was the miniature of his son, the king of Rome, under his left another of a much younger boy whose features faintly resembled his own. Was the latter the fruit of a swift love affair with a Mrs. Diana ...

... r7ww\cy\AAT7wvv\rywv'yv\/ CARADOC EVANS, the novelist who satirized the hypocrisy of the Welsh capel, s told his wife: If I die before you and you write about me, don't canonize me; don't whitewash me rule out the sentimentalist. s Write it out of yourself and it will be me. She J has tried to follow his behest in Caradoc Evans by Oliver Sandys (Hurst Blackett, 16s.). He s had the Welsh ...

... -- FROM the time when Reuter's first issued the briel announcement that several British Generals had escaped from their prison camp in Italy, it has been obvious that a big story must lie behind the report. Considerations of security made it impossible to publish the story any earlier, but Now It May Be Told. Farewell Campo 12 (Michael Joseph, 10s. 6d.) tells it modestly, as one would expect, ...

... IN his rise from Flying Officer, Wing Commander Guy Gibson, V.C., D.S.O., D.F.C., S served with fighters and most types of bombers. He led the daring raid on the Moehne and s Eder dams which washed out the Ruhr. Before he was reported missing from what was to have been his final flight over Germany as a master bomber he completed a book about s R.A.F. life and especially Bomber Command, which ...

... : Re-viewed by Alan Seymour WHEN our forces stormed the battlements of Europe on D-Day-- assuredly the most sen sational undertaking in history-- the military part of the action was known by the code name Operation Overlord. To the naval side of the invasion, however, a different code name was allotted-- Operation Neptune. And that code word provides the title of Commander Kenneth ...

... : Reviewed by T revor Allen A STRANGE thing about war is that nightmare should so quickly fade into dream. Talk of it to-day, even among the blitz gaps, and you will find yourself saying: Already it seems far away, long ago-- in another world. That is the impression produced by Mrs. Sarah Gertrude Millin's The Pit of the Abyss (Faber, 16s.), in which, with prodigious industry, she diarizes ...

... Reviewed by Trevor Allen TUNNELLING has always been one of the more absorbing hobbies of prisoners-of-war. When you can no longer soar like the eagle you burrow like the mole, if only from sheer perversity. But to build, under the noses of your German guards, an air- conditioning plant made from old milk tins, kit-bags, scrap wood, to pump air to workers in the escape tunnel-- that seems not ...

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... : Reviewed by T evor Allen REMEMBERING the glamorous, irresistible Amanda of Noel Coward's Private Lives, we find it difficult to believe that she was once little Gertrude Lawrence, cockney Clapham kid, who left school at ten to make her own living, roughed it on the road in good shows and bad, and once, when the ghost failed to walk on Friday night, turned barmaid to pay her landlady. ...

... : Reviewed by Trevor oj{llen DAVID the Shepherd-King wherever -- now he plucks his harp -- should be flattered to find that, more than 3,000 years after his passing, a distinguished general who served on Allenby's staff does him the honour of plotting his campaigns, mapping his battles, and comparing him with Hannibal Frederick the Great and Napoleon. David (Skeffington, 12s. 6d.) by Gen. Sir ...

... : Reviewed by Alan Seymour MARY LAVIN'S new book, The House in Clewe Street (Michael Joseph, 12s. 6d.), provides her debut as a novelist. Already she has given us two volumes of dis tinguished short stories-- Tales from Bective Bridge, her first, which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for the best work of fiction published in the fruitful year 1943, and The Long Ago, published the ...

... Reviewed by Trevor Allen THERE is something of Cobbett in Mr. J. Wentworth Day. He mounts his old chestnut hunter, Robert, and goes clip-clopping through the seagirt countryside, losing himself on dark heaths and being hailed by homing soldiers: 'Night, Buffalo Bill! He loves the cry of curlew and plover, the gossip of seamen, the smell of the saltings, the boom of the fowler's gun on lonely ...