... GISSING AGAIN A New Edition of A Life's Morning, and Other Publications Briefly Reviewed George Gissing died in 1903. To-day, owing to the exigencies of war and a certain measure of neglect, his rather joyless novels are hard to get, and the author is known to a diminishing circle of readers. Gissing's early experiences in Manchester preoccupied him with poverty and its brutalising effects ...

... THE ANGELIC AVENGERS (Putnam. 10s. 6d.) is definitely an oddity, since in style and plot it has a marked resemblance to the Gothic literature of the past two centuries, and that is a literary manner that is now almost forgotten and almost never practised. The novel is, how ever, much more readable than the term implies, and has great force and even a queer kind of excitement. The publishers ...

... MR. PETER DRUCKER will be remembered as the author of The End of Economic Man. Published be fore the war, it was the chal lenge of an organised industry working under a democratic system of free enterprise to the then Nazi menace, and it set forth certain economic argu ments which postulated the eventual destruction of historical ideologies in the struggle with the powerful forces which were ...

... BALBOA to MUSICK The Story of Pacific Conquest, and Other Books Briefly Reviewed When Vasco Nunez de Balboa, that roystering, ambitious and avaricious soldier of fortune, that prince of stow aways, set out for the New World, it was with the object of evading his debts in Spain. What he found was the Pacific Ocean and gold enough to pay off many times over the creditors he had left behind in ...

... THE story of the beginnings of the wartime Ministry of Information is a fairly chequered one, full of storms, trials and tribulations, and nearly always at the centre of these tempests was to be found a censor, or censors. it tOOK nearly three years of total war tn arhipvp mme sort of balanced I policy at the Ministry, and it says a great deal for the personality of Rear-Admiral G. P. Thomson, ...

... A SATIRICAL novel by a witty American woman is one of this week's best dis coveries. WE HAPPY FEW (Macdonald. 9s. 6d.) has been high on the best-seller lists in its own country for some time, but, as you know, that is no guarantee that a book will be equally popular over here. In this case, I think it has a fair chance of being extremely successful, and this in spite of the wholly and ...

... ACCORDING to his dedica tion, Mr. Cyril Connolly appears to have been unable to get an English publisher to take THE ROCK POOL (Hamish Hamilton. 8s. 6d.) when it was written in 1935. It was published in Paris in 1936 by a sportsman called lack Kahane, who waged a lonely guerilla war against English prudery (and who found my book so little salacious that he used to tell me it was a disgrace to ...

... STARTLING, original, pos sibly even shocking to a number of readers, is Mr. Robert Graves' KING JESUS (Cassell. 12s. 6d.). In this long book, which I sometimes felt as I read it was overburdened with the detail that may prove erudition, the author develops a theory that Jesus was born of an earthly father and mother, and that He was the temporal heir to Herod's kingdom. The book is written in ...

... IT is characteristic of Mr. James W. Drawbell that he should find in a poem by D. H. Lawrence the title of his book DRIFTS MY BOAT (Hutchinson. 12s. 6d.). Those who think of busy journalists and hard-driven and hard bitten editors of national news papers as tough individuals working sixteen hours a day on hard news stories, should pause to consider Mr. Drawbell's affection for a lovely poem ...

... THE present Earl Lloyd George has written a biography of his mother, DAME MARGARET (Allen and Unwin. 12s. 6d.), which is rather a tribute to her warm, human nature, her humour, her good sense and her wide scope of interest, than a date-by-date life story. I think it gains by the looseness of its form, though there might still be room for another more concise recital of the career of this ...

... THE PUNCH ARTIST WHO TURNED NOVELIST George du Maimer's Three Best Sellers of the '90's Provide An Omnibus Book George du Maurier, with his fond young mothers and their big, handsome, simple-minded husbands, his comely children and neat nurserymaids, his elongated dachshunds and noble St. Bernards, with his merciless ridicule of the æsthetes of the '80's, and his scorn of snobs and ...

... THERE is a temporary lull in the books which tell how the war was won, and while the war correspondents and the ghost writers of the generals pause for breath, we are able to consider why the war was lost. Mr. Trevor-Roper has given us one penetrating piece of history from an examination of the last days of Hitler, and now Major Milton Shulman, of the Canadian Armoured Corps, is able to give ...