... 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 ...

... IF the reader can once con vince himself of the existence, or even the proba bility, of the lovely Mira, her highly-strung husband Ralph, and the stolid lover Martin, then he will be in a fair way to appreciating Mr. Claude Houghton's new novel. THE QUARREL (Collins. 8s. 6d.). For myself, I found them a little stiff and at the same time wraithlike not responding to the ordinary stimuli of life ...

... ALL the discussions, the pros and cons and the endless talk that have surrounded and often further obscured the philosophy of Existentialism, can in a sense be disregarded when one is reading a novel by the chief exponent of that philosophy. Or, if not dis regarded, at least relegated to the background while the less complicated business of reading and enjoying the story itself goes on. M. ...

... NORTHWARD HO! The March of the Pioneers in Canada's Arctic Territories Go West, young man, declared Horace Greeley from his New York editofial offices. There is your hinterland, cried Rhodes as he gazed northwards to Central Africa from the Cape. Both men were realists with a touch of vision; both men were right in giving an impetus to the pioneering trends of the nineteenth century a spur ...

... 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 ...

... SIMON BOLIVAR, the great liberator, the hero of South American independence, was born in Venezuela in 1783, the son of rich parents of noble family. He died forty-seven years later, having spent nine- tenths of his personal fortune in the service of his country and, although he had for a long time unlimited control over the revenues of Colombia, Bolivia and Peru, without a penny of public ...

... PALESTINE: A PREJUDICED APPROACH Robin Maugham's New Book on the Problem of Jew and Arab In May 1947 Zionist Ben Hecht wrote in a New York Post advertisement addressed to the terrorists of Palestine: Every time you blow up a British arsenal, or wreck a British gaol, or send a British railroad train sky-high, or rob a British bank, or let go with your guns and bombs at British betrayers and ...

... LORD BEVERIDGE'S parents both lived a great part of their lives in India, where they first met and were married in 1876. Mrs. Beveridge was the daughter of a Liberal Victorian business-man, and she was at that time running a school for Indian girls; her husband was in the Indian Civil Service and was to become a magistrate. Both lived to a great age and died in 1929 within a few months of each ...

... TWO NOVELISTS WITH A PENCHANT FOR EXACTITUDE The Big Sky and Ruth Middleton Both Deserve to be Best-Sellers John Steinbeck has set a fashion in the rough-tough type of novel of the contemporary American scene, and now A. B. Guthrie, taking us back 120 years to pioneering days in the Upper Mississippi, before the first covered wagon came to disturb the serenity of its plains, before men cut ...

... PHON ETICAL FANCIES A Glasgow Publisher Has Ambitious Plans for the English Language From Scotland comes another villainous attack upon the English language, or, alternatively, another noble attempt to deal with the barbarities of our spelling. It all depends how you feel about phonetics. Mr. Peter D. Ridge- Beedle, a Glasgow publisher, has decided that the time has come to modify the English ...

... I SUPPOSE that the only thing that Norfolk has in common with Dorset-- apart from their both being English coastal counties with inadequate train services-- is that both have produced a splendid variety of English characters. Norfolk possibly leads in this, or else its figures have had better treat ment from the biographers, and certainlv Mr. R. W. Ketton-Cremer has done honour ably and well ...