... THE Brigadier Gerard of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stories was a fantastic and yet credible creature, slightly larger than life-size, and the hero of a thousand exploits, related and unrelated, or so we used to feel in the young and happy days when we were reading about him. It is I possible, we now hear, that this magnificent and flamboyant creature had a prototype in real life, and that he was ...

... THE memoir that his daughter has written about the great journalist, J. L. GARVIN (Heinemann. 12s. 6d.). is illuminating and tender. Miss Katharine Garvin has concen trated on the personal side of his life, and left his services to journalism and to the politi cal scene for another hand to delineate. tier dook nas Deen written essentially from her own memories of him as the father of young ...

... BERNARD MILES SURVEYS THE BRITISH THEATRE An Appeal for Cheaper Seats and Less Commercialism Bernard Miles has won a foremost place in British films, and in Great Expectations and Fame is the Spur he revealed himself to tens of thousands as a first-class character actor. Despite these screen successes, however, Mr. Miles is really a man of the theatre; we must make no mistake about that. ...

... THIRTY YEARS TO WRITE THE HISTORY OF WORLD WAR I Sir James Edmonds Completes His Record Brigadier-General Sir James E Edmonds has been in charge of the Military Branch, Historical Section, Committee of Imperial Defence, since 1919, and his task has been the writing of the history of World War I. In 1922 came Volume I, the story of the momentous battles of 1914, when Paris so nearly fell, and ...

... ONE would expect Field- Marshal Lord Mont gomery's writing to be crisp, factual and objective, and that, to an admirable degree, is exactly what it is in EL ALAMEIN TO THE RIVER SANGRO (Hutchinson. :5s.), his own account of the activities of the Eighth Army, during the nprinH whpn T rnmmanHpH +hp Army 13 August 1942 to 31 December 1943. If you are looking for any elements of showman ship in ...

... 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 ...