... : 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 ...

... Children's books, of which there was such a famine during the war, are now appearing in satisfactory numbers in time for Christmas. Elizabeth Bowen reviews below some of those which have most appealed to her CHRISTMAS is the season for children's books. This year they are gay and many; here are notes on a few: Stuart Little, by American E. B. White lamish Hamilton 7 s. (id.), so completely c ...

... At /ifyu/jj* THE TATLER THEATRE GUIDE Straight Plays And No Birds Sing (Aldwych). A comedy with Elizabeth Allan playing a woman doctor with very progressive ideas and Harold Warrender is the man who loves her in spite of them. Grand National Night (Apollo). Leslie Banks is a pleasant murderer who has the audience on his side, with Qerinionc Baddeley in dual character roles. Good acting in a ...

... Our Town (New) WHEN the Blue Boy of Gainsborough was cleaned the boy was seen to be as blue as a kingfisher, and at once many people said the picture was ruined; it had lost all that old-mastery mellowness which was their name for dirt. Mr. Thornton Wilder is one of America's more austere playwrights, and he cannot wait for time to mellow his stage pictures. He uses only those colours which ...

... ELIZABETH BOWES Around Cinemas Peggy Windsor and the American Soldier Anna Collett Attitude A ROUND CINEMAS (Home and Van Thal; 15s.) is a selection of James Agate's film criticism onward from 1921: the last piece is dated March 1945. The making of the selection has been Mr. Agate's work-- and no small undertaking, I should say; for it is to this that the book owes its point, meaning and ...

... ELIZABETH BOWES'S Four Studies in Loyalty The Campaign in Burma To Bed with Grand Music THE capacity for loyalty must be latent in everyone who is not a moral defective. Some people, however, show the capacity to be loyal in a more constant and more developed form. We all know what we mean when, in describing a friend, we add-- and, he [or she] is extraordinarily loyal. To whom, to what? We ...

... Here Come The Boys (Saville) IT is a long time since Mr. Jack Hulbert was the pride and joy of the Footlights at Cambridge in May Week, but he is still quite well known as the man with a long chin and a clever wife: thus Mr. Bobby Howes, with a smile of engaging friendliness. Mr. Hulbert's clown-like visage sets and his blue eye grows cold as he tries to remember for what Mr. Howes was once ...

... Soldier's Wife (Duchess) THIS is so definitely a play about women written by Miss Rose Franken for the entertainment of women that a man, though ready to swear that it is a very bad play, cannot be sure that it will not turn out to be a very popular one. Many thousands of women may feel that the heroine is just their cup of tea. She is what they know themselves to be with a romantic ...

... reviewing BOOKS ELIZABETH BOWES Maturity THE CONDEMNED PLAYGROUND (Rout ledge; Ios. 6d.) is a collection of essays, satires and critical pieces by Cyril Connolly. It offers an open view of the mind, and displays the extraordinary range of powers of one of the most important critics of a genera tion-- the generation now in its young maturity. A generation that has, for a long time, been ...

... Summer at Nohant (Lyric, Hammersmith) GEORGE SAND is only a foreign name to most English novel readers, and even in France where a hundred years ago it was taken for granted that her writings had the stuff of immortality in them she is not much read today. She lives only in the legend of her life and love affairs. She was a strange woman. As Balzac remarked, she hangs together perfectly if ...

... : 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 ...