... 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 ...

... RECORD DF THE WEEK INTRODUCING a new tenor, Giuseppe di Stefano, making his bow on his first His Master's Voice record, singing in Italian Lamento di Federico E la Solita Storia from Cilea's L'Arlesiana and Lucevan le Stelle from Tosca. Here is a young Sicilian singer of whom we are bound to hear a great deal more. It is certain that his' warm personality and gaiety will qualify him for a ...

... Margery Allinghanrs The Black Laurel Beggar's Fiddle Tahiti Landfall The Lost Ant Dclius PERHAPS, when once one becomes aware that one is living in history, it is safe to assume that events have become so gigantic and so close that one's view is a little out of focus. The effect of the object being out of focus is, of course, blur. Miss Storm Jameson is a writer of great per ception, precise ...

... 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 ...

... 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 ...

... CUt Remember Mama (Aldwycli) The Shoemaker's Holiday (O.U.D.S.) IT is hard to forgive Mr. Van Druten. He has put all his professional cunning at the service of a little story which plays unscrupulously on our most sacred emotions. We are asked to remember Mama-- and to grow weepsy as our enchanted memories of childhood reveal her unfailing goodness. It is Mama as we should remember her if ...

... Vigrhimare Abbey and Crotchet Castle Tempestuous Pettleoat The Government Inspector Music Tells All Elizabeth Havens THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK'S two short novels Nightmare Abbey and Crotchet Castle, written in 1818 and 1831, reappear now in one volume, in the pleasing format of Messrs. Hamish Hamilton's Novel Library, at 6s. J. B. Priestley, a long-standing Peacock-lover, and author of the ...

... (fcfa Anthony Cookman Tom Titt and Cockpit (Playhouse) MISS BRIDGET BOLAND sets out to tell us what the Displaced Persons left crawling about the cockpit of Europe after Hitler's defeat thought and felt about each other and about the British way of handling them and their problems. This may not appear a very attractive prospectus to those with an evening to invest in entertainment. It rather ...

... The Education of Girls Bygone Pleasures of London The Golden Age of Vienna Memoirs of a Ghost Margery Alliiigliiiu*s HAD I been told last week that I should sit up most of the night unable to put down a book on the education of women, by a County Education Officer, I should have been mildly apprehensive. As one whose own school education consisted of a series of two-year experiments ...

... . P. Moran, Operative. By Percival Wilde. (Gollancz 8s. 6d.) The name should have been spelt with two o's. But I found these stories of a Correspondence School detective highly diverting. The Lost Ant. By Miriam Blanco-Fombona. (Allen and Unwin 7s. 6d.) A crudely-written tale about an Andean peasant who wins a lottery and becomes a diplomat in London. Chinese Crackers. By Edward Ward. (The ...

... By C. A. Leieune BLANCHE FURY.-- a Technicolor British film from Joseph Shear ing's case-history of a Victoria governess, who takes a post in her uncle's home and finds herself involved in family feud and murder. Blanche Fury (Valerie Hobson) marries her employer's son, but falls in love with her employer's land agent (Stewart Granger): an angry young man who gets that way because he is ...

... OUR BOOKSHELF Rupert Croft-Cooke OUR REVIEWER'S CHOICE LATE HAVE 1 LOVED THEE. By Ethel Mannin. (Jarrolds 12s. 6 d.) NO RESTING PLACE. By Ian Niall. (Heinemann 9s. 6d.) THE LOVELY AND THE LOVED. By Joan Morgan. Macdonalds 8s. 6 d.) TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT. By Clare Leighton. (Gollancz 12s. 6 d.) LATE HAVE I LOVED THEE.-- I find it hard to do justice to Miss Ethel Mannin's new novel, for while ...