... THE play is memory, says the narrator upon whom the lights first flash at the Haymarket Theatre. Presently, behind him, we see the shadowy outlines of the interior-- and some of the exterior-- of the Wingfield home in an alley of St. Louis during the 'thirties. And in another minute he is him self merged in the play as Tom Wingfield, rebellious son of the fluttering, talkative, silly ...

... By Katharine Susannah Prichard. (Cape 10s. 6d.) A novel about Australia, as vast and arid as the country itself. ...

... OF all the rôles an actor has to attempt in his career, that of a downright good man is probably the most difficult. Almost any talented actor can make a sinner interesting, but it is the very devil to play a saint. Goodness, real goodness, is a quality that defeats exhibition ism, for the true heart of goodness is humility. It is in its achievement of the portrait of a man who was at once ...

... By Alan Melville IF ever you have the good fortune to be invited for a week-end at the Emlyn Williams country seat (and you should stop at nothing, short of blackmail, to secure such an invitation) you will find only two minor items on the debit side of the Week-end balance-sheet. (1) You will be forced to play a great many sets of tennis against Mr. Williams, who-- though by no stretch of the ...

... IT is clear from the beginning that Alexander Korda's new version of Anna Karenina has an admirable purpose: to bring Tolstoy's novel to the screen as meticulously as may be within the limits of theatre-time and film con vention, and to build up a sense of a period and a society which conditioned the tragedy. This is something new. In all the earlier Hollywood versions, Anna Karenina was ...

... YOU shall not know by what strange accident I chancèd on this letter, says Portia, at the end of The Merchant of Venice, when Shakespeare is bluffing shamelessly in order to get the play ended. Similarly, you need not know by what strange accident I was obliged to see most of Traveller's Joy on my feet, standing at the back of the Criterion stalls. I had not stood through a play since ...

... . By Jan Ciechanowski. (Gollancz 18s.) Yet another account of the betrayal of Poland. The author writes with clarity and authority. He was Polish Ambassador in the United States until his Government ceased to be recognised. it- ...

... . By Mary Durham. (Skeffington 9s. 6d.) Conventional crime but quite an ingenious solution ...

... TO think that such a thing should happen to people like us! It is the cry of the decent, kindly suburban grocer, miraculously embodied by Miles Malleson-- looking as though he might have come from some latter-day Diary of a Nobody-- as he leaves the consultation cell in a London prison. And what thing has happened? Merely the condemna tion and sentence of his daughter upon a capital ...

... EVER since the inception of the Fabian Society, the Labour movement has not lacked intellectuals, and throughout its growth has been nourished and sustained by many skilled dialecticians who could command a reading public. Even more valuable has been the type of scholar not lacking in the common touch who could put the views of the comrades over to the community. Mr. Francis Williams was for ...

... LEAR, KING OF NONSENSE A New Collection of the Celebrated Rhymes, and Other Books Briefly Reviewed The cry of the Nupiter Piffkin, the call of the Biscuit Buffalo, the Fimble Fowl with a corkscrew leg (see Verse IV of the Quangle Wangle's Hat), the Pobble with no toes, the AkancT of Swat (Did he sleep on a mattress, a bed or a cot?), not forgetting, of course, the Jumblies and the Yonghy ...

... WHEN bad men combine, the good men asso ciate, wrote Burke, and that might be taken as the motif of THE WEST AT BAY (Allen and Unwin. 12s. 6d.), a survey of our present situation by that brilliant young economist, Miss Barbara Ward. Starting with the premise that no corner of the world except perhaps Ancient Greece has contributed as much as Western Europe to the development and enrichment ...