... REVIEWED 111 ELIZABETH BOWEA Back The Becker Wives Grimm's Household Tales Uncle Albert's Manual of Practical Photography BACK (Hogarth Press; 8s. 6d.) is the new Henry Green novel. This novelist likes his titles brief. You will--or, if I may say so, should-- remember Loving, and, before that, Caught. At the beginning of Mr. Green's career we had Living and Blindness. In a less certain ...

... WE are told that Mr. Trevor Evans, the author of BEVIN (George Allen and Unwin. 10s. 6d.), has secured the wholehearted co-operation of some of Bevin's close asso ciates in the compilation of this book. the amount of co-operation Mr. Trevor Evans received from Mr. Ernest Bevin himself is revealed in the chap ter in which the author describes in detail his visit to the Foreign Secretary on ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. MR. HENRY GREEN has established him self as a novelist with a technique and even an idiom of his own. The technique is of the streamlined kind: bare and spare and steely, his story holds to its course through a bleak, harsh landscape, rarely slowing down, still more rarely pausing, and carrying the minimum of extra weight in the way of ornament and comment. His technique is ...

... TL Vanity Fair (Comedy) THERE is no need to elaborate the obvious: when Thackeray's novel has been put upon the stage to the satisfaction of Thackerayans there will be nothing left under the visiting moon worth calling impossible. The most that can be reasonably expected of any attempt is not much more than Miss Constance Cox manages to give us. We get a sprightly costume play about a ...

... Piccadilly Hayride (Prince of Wales) ANYONE old enough to remember the music hall in its great days (1890 is not too early a date, 1930 not too recent) naturally resents the suggestion that the essence of the thing has in fact survived. It is an anti-social suggestion. If he can't lament the disappearance of true variety, out falls the conversational peg on which he had hoped to hang tender, ...

... Arthur Koestler is in the news. A translation of his book, Darkness at Noon, which flays the Soviet system, was published last month in Paris. The French Communists, determined to keep the book out of the hands of the general public, invaded the bookshops and bought up all the copies they could lay hands on. The gratified publishers announced, as a result, net sales of 250,000 copies. ...

... 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 ...

... 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 ...

... : 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 ...

... ALL the qualities which make for a great art in which pity and terror are in full degree extracted from tragedy are in Miss Edith Sitwell's FANFARE FOR ELIZABETH (Macmillan. 12s. 6d.). The story begins with an extraordinarily vivid sketch of life in England, and in London in particular, at the time when Elizabeth of England was born. Over the scene broods that terrible giant with a beard of ...

... THE MAGIC OF THE HIMALAYAS A Fine New Mountaineering Album By F. S. Smythe When Mallory and Irvine disappeared behind the face of Everest in 1924, giving no indication of whether they achieved their objective before they died, there were many who questioned the wisdom of further attempts on the summit of the world's greatest peak, and some, indeed, who averred that it was all a great waste of ...

... THE first time I met Alex ander Woollcott was some years ago, in Noel Coward's house in the country. There were a number of people in the party, and most of them were extremely good at the word- games we played after dinner. Rebecca West was, not sur prisingly, brilliant, but the most adept of all was Woollcott. Now this was no matter for comment, since it was, in fact, Woollcott who had ...