... . By L. Luard. (Nicholson and Watson 15s.) A good miscellany of Commander Luard's writings over many years about little ships. BOOKS IN BRIEF ...

... WHEN a novel is as good as Norman Collins's London Belongs to Me, probably the safest way of bringing it to the screen is to tick as closely as possible to the author's blue prints. Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, who Produced the new British film at the Leicester square, have done just this. To be sure, Mr. Collins saw his dramatis persona: om a rather longer viewpoint, and in more ...

... 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 ...

... FOR the first ten minutes of My Brother Jonathan I should not have believed, even if an archangel had come down from heaven to tell me, that I should be slipping this film into this space above this authentic signature as my choice of the best new picture of the week. The opening of My Brother Jonathan is terrible. We are introduced to a young actor, in an abominably ill-fitting grey wig ...

... . By Shelley Smith. (Collins Crime Club 8s. 6 d.) A good thriller. But the publishers say that this penetrating psychological study has the dram atic intensity of Zola's Thercse Raquin. Really, a ...

... . it By Cecilie Leslie. (Cassell 12s. 6 d.) The Indian's love of metaphor has let him in for this quite silly piece of melodrama among the memsahibs. The author solemnly describes the actual sacrifice of a goat. ...

... Susannah Sings. w By Maxine Hewson. (Peter Davies 9s. bd.) Spirited tale of a girl's rise to stardom and a wedding in one of London's biggest churches. ...

... SARABAND FOR DEAD LOVERS. A Conscientious Technicolor romance based on Helen Simpson's version of the Koenigsmark story which has ex cluded sensationalism so rigorously that in the end it manages to be just a little plodding. It has breeding, however, and, whenever Franfoise Rosay is on the screen, a natural magnificence. Joan Greenwood and Stewart Granger suggest what the star-crossed lovers ...

... f^4etc/i -ffiocA BEVERLEY BAXTER. A STOCKBROKER friend of mine has decided that he will become a farmer in Ireland. Being a man of action, he is tired of playing dominoes with his partners while they wait for the telephone to get over its sulk and start speaking again. I gather that it is not so much a desire on his part to milk cows or feed pigs as it is to gaze upon dusk as it descends on ...

... . By Margaret Archer. (Jarrolds 9s. 6d.) Poison and sentimentality. The rustics talk in indefatigably rustic dialect and there 's an Irishman who savs bad cess to him and a cup of tay. R. C.-C. ...