... FATHER DOMINIC'S MISSION The Story of the Passionist Priest Who Received Newman into the Roman Catholic Faith In our own day the reception of Father Vernon into the Roman Catholic Church was a sensation of the first order, but it was as nothing to the conversion of John Henry New man in the '40's of the last century. England could hardly believe this news of the man who had once described ...

... 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 ...

... IF the character of Napoleon crosses the stage during the performance of a play, or appears for a minute or two on the screen during a film, then, even if the play or the film are about totally different people, they will lose most of their life and vitality. It will leave with Napoleon s exit, and the audience will be, even if it is subconsciously, waiting for him to appear again and paying ...

... IN the ten years after 1915 there was a migration in American literature from the villages and the small towns into the big cities, and of this migration there were five chief pioneers: Sherwood Anderson, H. L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather and Scott Fitzgerald. This is the thesis of Mr. Maxwell Geismar, who, in The Last of the Provincials (Seeker and War burg. 16s.), analyses the work ...

... THE PLANTAGENETS A New Estimate of a Dark Era in Our History What manner of men were the Plantagenets? No other dynasty has reigned so long over England since the Norman Conquest, and yet somehow they remain shadowy figures, those Kings who wore the sprig of broom, descen dants of Geoffrey, Count of Anjou, and the Empress Maud, or else, where Shakespeare turned the floodlights upon them, we ...

... THERE are some good novels this week and, though none of them is necessarily of great significance, they make a satisfying and notable list. First of all, A QUIET NEIGH BOURHOOD (Heinemann. 8s. 6d.), a book of considerable character in spite of its gently restricted theme. Mrs. Anne Goodwin Winslow writes, if I may use an old-fashioned term, like a lady, with restraint, delicacy and a polite ...

... Irving Stones SAILOR ON HORSEBACK, that truly brilliant life of Jack London, now appears in a second, most welcome edition (The Bodley Head. 10s. 6d.). This is a biography that deserves to live, and surely will do so, because the author and his hero are so completely in tune. It is obvious that Irving Stone has known something of the same kind of life as Jack London did at the turn of the ...

... THIS has been a week of novels, with no books of that type known to booksellers as general, or even, less amiably, miscellaneous. But the novels themselves have been interesting enough and, in one case, even stimulating. William Medium (Bodley Head. ios. 6d.) is a story told at length and discursively, in the pattern of the nineteenth-century writer, by Mr. Edward Hyams, who has chosen as ...

... ONE of the greatest of all the magnificent painters in Spain's history is the subject of Miss Flora Sandstrom's new novel. Goya was a genius, and in that sense a universal figure, but his genius was peculiarly Spanish, and his works have the passionate imprint of a Spanish heart and mind and hand re cording the Spanish scene in the eighteenth century. The Dancing Giant (Arthur Barker, gs. 6d.) ...

... THE event of the week, as far as the world of novels is concerned, is publication of Mr. Graham Greene's THE HEART OF THE MATTER (Heine mann. 9s. 6d.). It is news, too, because this is, at least partly, a love story, and love stories as such have not been the basis for Mr. Greene's reputation as a writer. It is also the story of a different kind of saint, though the author might dispute that ...

... 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 ...

... IT was Cardinal Newman's wish that anyone writing a biography of him should begin with his forty-fifth year, the year in which he was admitted into the Catholic Church, and so far the biographers have fol lowed that desire and written mainly of his life as a Catholic, beginning with the great controversy caused by his leaving the Church of England. In i8as. this steD of Newman's was ...