... BOOK REVIEWS ELIZABETH BOWES S MWM ON BOORS They Went to Portugal Diversion House Under Mars Uninvited Guests Is civilisation really on the decline? We have fought to preserve it: now that we look round there might seem, at the first glance, to be remarkably little left. We are confronted by dilapidation (more depressing, because subtler in its effects, than out-and-out ruin), bv long, heart ...

... Article Film Critic JAMES AGATE resumes his HOME-KEEPING Englander that you are, reader dear, what picture do you make to yourself of Provence? A romantic mise en scène of Tennysonian retreats, where never wind blows loudly-- shades of the mistral and sirocco!-- and where poppy, lotus, and mandragora are the staple fare? A land something more westerly in temper than our own West Country, a ...

... ELIZABETH BOWES S Fanfare for Elizabeth Pipe Night Death and the Pleasant Voices Pandora FANFARE FOR ELIZABETH, by Edith Sit well (Macmillan; 12s. 6d.), is something far rarer than a biography. It is a poetic interpretation of the mind of the girl-child and, later, young girl who was in time to become Queen Elizabeth-- that brilliant, daunting and cryptic sixteenth-century figure, one of the ...

... King Lear (New) FOR the opening of the Old Vic's new season, Mr. Laurence Olivier had been set two problems of daunting complexity. He was to produce a tragedy which some have thought essentially too big for the stage, and himself play Lear, a part beyond the powers of many famous tragic actors. But the feeling that Mr. Olivier is now one of the makers of theatrical history has become general ...

... THE NIGHT AND THE LAUGHTER (Coliseum) COLOUR and music, there is a happy abundance of both in this particular night, but laughter is in almost total eclipse. Only one explanation of the misleading title occurs to me. The show was devised by Mr. Robert Nesbitt, and having duly arranged for a first-rate comedian to be in attendance, Mr. Nesbitt became absorbed in devising a series of ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. WHEN somebody observes to Cole Porter, in NIGHT AND DAY (Warner Theatre), shaking his head over one of the Master's more esoteric numbers, You should have been born on the East Side, like some of our more popular boys, I felt it was a cry from the heart of an anguished screen-writer. Did I say screen-writer? I should have said writers. It takes no fewer than four of ...

... . By JOHN RUSSELL. HAMLET without the Prince is proverbi ally a poor affair; but if one may judge from the Old Vic production at the New Theatre, LEAR with out the King would make an excellent short melodrama of family life. One of the virtues of Mr. Olivier's production is that each of the subsidiary characters, so often foreshortened in the interests of a star actor, is given room and ...

... THE jacket of READING LIKED (Hamish. Hamilton. 15s.) describes it as a prose anthology selected by Clifton Fadiman. Perhaps because Mr. Fadiman has some forthright things to say about the uselessness of blurbs, the publisher does not vouchsafe any further information than a lief of the selectedd authors Before venturing his 15s. on Mr. Fadiman's personal taste in literature, the reader ...

... An Inspector Calls (New) MR. PRIESTLEY'S new play is, on the surface, a simple and orderly exposition of the way things do not happen. A single family is shown to be collectively responsible for the death of a woman who has poisoned herself. Mr. Birling, a well-to-do Midland manufacturer, recognizes the photograph which the inspector shows him. She is the woman he dismissed from his works ...

... ELIZABETH B (UVEA'S The River Road Mainly on the Air Judgment in Suspense IN America, Frances Parkington Keyes enjoys an august position on the best-seller lists. Her name works magic-- here, it is less well- known. Or, should I say more strictly, she is not fashionable. But this, I discovered, does not alter the fact that Mrs. Parkington Keyes is in steady demand in England: she sells to ...

... Elizabeth Bowen Reviewing: LOOKING across the Thames from Kew towing-path one is confronted, these days, by a drab, disappointing scene. In fact, I have even gone so far as to wish that a gigantic mirror could be suspended half-way across the river: by duplicating the loveliness behind one and concealing the squalor of gas works, slag-heaps, cranes and general colour less dustiness, it could ...

... 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 ...