... 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 ...

... SAMUEL ORCHART BEETON, the hustling young Fleet Street publisher who won fame with an English pirate edition of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and rivalled Chambers of Edinburgh and the great John Cassell by diffusing useful educational matter long before public education had become a national concern, deserves at least an individual niche in literary history. Such, however, has not ...

... THE word remote can mean far-off or distant, but it can also mean, if you press it, far-fetched or unusual, and that is the meaning that I would give to it when writing of that part of north-western Maine, where Mrs. Louise Dickinson Rich lives, and has lived for some years, in an intimate contact with nature that would appal most women as young and as attractive as she. The lakes and rivers ...

... DR. WILLIAM BEEBE is one of that distinguished number who can write about scientific matters to the full comprehension of the layman, and even if from time to time he includes such phrases as I had one advantage over such a platyhelminth, he is not jeering, but simply com paring his status with that of the flatworm. Book of Bays (Bodley Head. 15s.) would be worth studying for the photographs ...

... LAUREATES of LATIN AMERICA Verbal Acrobatics in a New Anthology Dudley Fitts, poet and literary critic, has compiled the ANTHOLOGY OF CONTEMPORARY LATIN- AMERICAN POETRY (Falcon Press. 21s.). Here the Spanish, Portuguese and French texts are printed opposite the English translations, so that the reader can have access to the original through parallel reading. At the end are instructive ...

... IN 1947 La Peste was first published in France, but it did not require this great novel, for such it is, to tell the French people that they have in their midst a novelist of the first order, with something of the power of Malraux. Now Stuart Gilbert's fine trans lation appears under the title of THE PLAGUE (Hamish Hamilton. 9s. 6d.), and in the hands of this sensitive translator that original ...

... SACHEVERELL IN HOLLAND A Robust and Penetrating Survey Sir Osbert Sitwell holds the literary stage with his auto biography, the second volume of which earned him an award for the most distinguished work of the year, and the third, just published, brought him a chorus of unanimous praise. But for originality originality-- based on an intelli gent, unfettered approach-- and for gracious prose, ...

... THE warm spring weather is certainly bringing out the new novels in a flurry of promise and, sometimes, of performance. First of all there is a work by that elegant veteran of the craft, Mr. Gil bert Frankau, who has written his first novel for some years, and one of his longest and most moving, with MICHAEL'S WIFE (Macdonald. 12s. 6d.). l'svchiatr.v and analysis and psychoanalysis have lately ...

... THAT distinguished and witty scholar, Mr. G. M. Young, describes himself as one of the very few now living who can not only write but think Victorian. If that is to be his definition of one who can think straight and express-- himself with a beautiful lucidity and grace, then no one will quarrel with it. A new collection of his essays and addresses has just been published, and I cannot counsel ...

... BY long odds, THE AMERICANS (Cresset Press, 10s. 6d.) is the most remarkable book of the week. This is a study, revealing and readable, of the characteristics of the people of the United States, and it has been made by Mr. Geoffrey Gorer, a British anthropologist whose serious contribution to this science is only equalled in value by his admirable candour. Mr. Gorer's findings are sometimes ...

... In 1902 Anna of the Five Towns introduced to the world that series of remarkable novels with the Potteries as background which brought fame to the name of Enoch Arnold Bennett. He created an unforgettable picture of life in industrial Staffordshire. Bennett, however, did not allow the artist in him to prevail, and it is for this reason that he may be a puzzle to the new generation, and it is ...

... 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 ...