... The Red Prussian Stranger at Home The Woman in Rlark The Royal Family in Africa rPHE Red Prussian, by Leopold Schwarzs- child (Hamish Hamilton 16s.), is a biography of Karl Marx. Marx the Man, as distinct from Marx the Legend, is [to quote the wrapper] Mr. Schwarzschild's subject. The subject has been dealt with not too kindly in fact, I can but feel that the author's aim has been more or ...

... NOT since the days of Pal grave's Golden Treasury, or the Oxford Book of English Verse, has there been an antho logy in any way comparable with POETRY OF THE ENGLISH- SPEAKING WORLD (Heinemann. 15s.). Its selection is the result of a lifetime of reading and many years of work by Mr. I Richard Aldington, whose own reputation as a poet and distinguished scholar pre pares one in some measure for ...

... WHEN RAFFLES MET BONAPARTE A New Biography of the Founder of Singapore In 1816 Thomas Stamford Raffles, homeward bound from Java, paused for a few brief hours at the island of St. Helena, and there, in meeting Napoleon, he satisfied a deep and long-felt desire. What Raffles, the brilliant but not always appreciated servant of the East India Company, for ever in danger of being caught in the ...

... Rupert Croft-Cooke TALKING OF DICK WHITTINGTON. --Those enviable people whom I hear tracing the identity of some person or object from the answers to the first six of Twenty Questions, seem satisfied with the classification Fact or Fiction. The book trade is more wary and speaks of all books which are not actually and obviously novels by the loose term Non-Fiction. All my four books this ...

... . . By Rom Landau. (Macdonald ys. 6d.) (Macdonald ys. 6d.) Neat short stones by a practised hand. ...

... . By E. M. Almedingen. (the Bodley Head; 8s. 6d.) A sequel to the author's autobiography To-morrow Will Come. It is all rather solemn and self-conscious, as befits the work of someone who was brought up in Russia, escaped to Rome in the 1920's, and eventually reached England, which country, her publishers say, she had always felt to be her spiritual home. What is a' spiritual home ...

... Elizabeth Bewens ARTHUR BRYANT'S Samuel Pepys: The Man in the Making was first published by the Cambridge University Press in 1933-- the tercentenary of Pepys' birth. It is the first volume of the famous Pepys trilogy, now taken over by Messrs. Collins-- the next two, The Years of Peril and The Saviour of the Navy, are to follow as soon as publishing exigencies permit. Well printed inside ...

... r\ER HIRT AUF DEM FELSEN was written in October 1828, the last year of Schubert's life. Anna Milder-Hauptmann,. a famous singer of that period, asked him to compose a song for her so that she could display her voice. A clarinet obbligato was set down as further embellishment to the voice, and it is thought that Schubert had a particular clarinet player in mind when scoring this. Be that as it ...

... By John Courtenay CHRISTMAS still haloes the theatre programmes, and-- except for Mickey Rooney's good-tempered hurtling into Palladium variety-- there have been no West End changes since my last article. A play I have not reviewed previously in The Sketch, The Blind Goddess (Apollo), is Sir Patrick Hastings's most impressive contribution to the stage. It depends largely upon a court scene ...

... I HAVE only one real complaint about Wynyard Browne's emotional play at the St. Martin's: there are too few people in it. He has limited his cast to five: that is, to the blinded sailor who will regain his sight in the third act; the women between whom he must choose; the possessive mother; and, for comic relief, a twittering spinster, a paying guest fit to enter, say, Munro's At Mrs. Beam's, ...

... IT is a curious and melancholy thing that the screen never seems to be more impressive, more fluent, more at ease than when it is presenting films about crime. Violence appears rob the film of its emotional inhibitions: pro ducers who have not the faintest idea how to now ordinary people reacting to everyday cir cumstances seem to attain a masterly control of their medium when they are dealing ...

... By C. A. Lejeune QUAI DES ORFÈVRES.-- A brilliantly- made and fascinating story of a police investigation in the back stage music-hall world of Paris. A jealous husband plans an alibi for the murder of the man he believes to be his wife's lover: but finds the victim already murdered. The Scotland Yard of Paris picks up his trail and, detail by pains taking detail, the real story is uncovered. ...