... or PARIS BOOKSHOPS iiizabm mum (on Holiday) ANYONE back again in Paris for the first time since 1939, probably-- after one general, dazzled look round-- makes for their old haunts. Your reviewer made for the bookshops. As to these, conflicting reports have been brought home by those who, since 1944 and the Liberation, have had reason to travel between England and France. Accounts of a book ...

... SHORT REVIEWS A Selection from the Newest Publishers' Lists TEN THOUSAND men and women, working in more than seventy countries and upon the high seas, maintained the life-lines of British and Allied communications during the war years, and a record of their devoted service, the official war history of Cable and Wireless Ltd., has been compiled by Charles Graves and published under the title of ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. IN order to obviate impending quarrels between husband and wife, arguments with girl friend, bets with boy friend, and letters to the film critics, I hasten to record the fact that Catherine McLeod doesn't really play the music you see her play in CONCERTO (Gaumont and Marble Arch Pavilion). Arthur Rubinstein does, and pretty busy he is kept, too. Very early in Concerto ...

... 77ie Poltergeist (Vaudeville) IN a world much too full of things that constantly need to be looked for, even the stoutest disbeliever in ghosts is driven, on occasion, to admit the possibility of poltergeists. To leave a letter, a bill, a receipt, an identity card, or a coupon lying about is to be suddenly plunged, calling frenziedly for help, into desperate rummagings; to put it in a safe ...

... Pick-up Girl (Prince of Wales) MAX once had the hardihood to assert that there was better drama to be found in the law courts than the theatre could provide. However that may be, it is the drama of the law courts that this play attempts to reproduce-- the drama of an American juvenile court, unfolding in matter-of-fact terms the shocking case of a girl of fifteen who, through the perhaps in ...

... Marriage a la Mode (1S7. James's) MR. JOHN CLEMENTS has taken an obvious risk in admitting a Dryden comedy to share his theatre with The Kingmaker. Style is its chief recommendation. Some of the lines have great poetic charm, and all of them, even the bawdy ones, issue unmistakably from a manly, confident, sensible and supple mind. It is a pleasure to be in contact with this mind, and at the ...

... SHORT REVIEWS A Selection from the Newest Publishers' Lists BOOK publishing, as someone has aptly said, is at once an art, a craft, and a business, and there can be few men who understand better every angle of publishing than Sir Stanley Unwin, whose near-classic, THE TRUTH ABOUT PUB LISHING (George Allen and Unwin. 8s. 6d.), has now been reissued in revised form. In some ways the title of ...

... THE' LITERARY LOUNGER. By L. P. HARTLEY. THE SCARLET TREE is the second volume of Sir Osbert Sitwell's autobiography. The title may make one wonder. What tree is this? An exotic tree, possibly Chinese? A bibelot, a model, made of coral, per haps, or sealing-wax? A family tree with the parent stem picked out in red Sir Osbert's tree is none of these. It is the blood, that fragile, scarlet tree ...

... IT could be said that the pre mise of Mr. F. L. Green's new book is, that true freedom exists only in the mind of the indi vidual. This philosophical novel, A FLASK FOR THE JOURNEY (Michael Joseph. 10s. 6d.), has two distinct stories, barely linked by the chance meeting of the two chief characters, and that is necessarily a weakness in it. But Mr. Green writes with the imaginative sympathy ...

... THERE can scarcely be one among the readers of this page who has not, at some time during the last six years, been frustrated in his attempt to buy or to borrow a book which he has read about or has heard discussed. He knows that there is a paper shortage and that book publishers have been severely rationed during the war. Possibly he has read somewhere that more tnan 20,000,000 dooks were ...

... : Reviewed by Trevor ...

... ELIZABETH IIOWES S Bright Day Myrmyda The American People Suitable for Framing J.B. PRIESTLEY'S new novel, Bright Day (Heinemann; Ios. 6d.), reads like a final comment on all nostalgic literature. In finitely unlike Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, it has, roughly speaking, the same theme-- the enslavement of a young man's imagination by a romantic, glamorous, highly-characterised family. ...