... Elizabeth Hewehs BEMELMANS' Dirty Eddie-- announced in its native land as the novel about Holly wood to end all novels about Hollywood-- has now come to London. More exactly, it has been published in England by Messrs. Hamish Hamilton, at 8s. 6d. I should like to stress that the operative factor in this announcement is not so much more about Hollywood as more-- and, arguably, even the ...

... CUb MR. ARTHUR MACRAE'S new farcical comedy is lightly and continuously funny. It is quite brilliantly acted. The curtain rises at the good old time of eight thirty, and no other entertainment in town is so likely to justify an experiment which has been tried once before without success. It is at the right address. It gives Miss Yvonne Arnaucl the bset part that she has had for some time, and ...

... Cbtr e- Anthony Cookman with Tom Titt The Gioconda Smile (New) THE playhouse, once the Devil's favourite haunt, is really a very moral place. Without any prompting from the censor, it imposes all sorts of restraints on authors who, within the covers of their books, are free to be wholly uninhibited. See how even Mr. Aldous Huxley must answer to the bridle. When he wrote the story of a rich ...

... BOB is also Leslie Henson, and we are well content to be his nephews. To me he has not changed very much since an August evening in 1919, when he flung himself upon the stage of the Winter Garden Theatre in Kissing Time. That night a ten-year-old was enraptured by the Henson goggle eyes, the Henson croak, and that curious, inquiring thrust of the head, as of a sparrow-cum-goldfish. To-day ...

... A' DOUBLE LIFE THIS was the film that won Ronald Colman an Academy Award for the best actor's performance of the year, and in everything that touches on one-half of his performance-- the private side of the double life of a matinée idol-- he triumphs effortlessly. Anthony John is a fashionable Broadway actor, a darling of the gods, who loses himself in his parts more thoroughly than most. ...

... Spanish serenade. An Argentinian film in Spanish, with irritating American-English titles, bout the life of the composer Albeniz. Fine eading performance from Pedro Lopez Lagar. so evil my love. Another murder tale from the aspidistra period. Not my cup of poison. daybreak.-- -Monckton Hoffe's cheerless little number about the private life of a public hangman decorative in places, but made ...

... (bt Maid to Measure f Cambridge Anthony Cookman with Tom Titt IT is not often that any sort of show puts off the desolating look of failure and takes on the pleasing air of modest but assured success in the course of a journey from one theatre to another. Yet this is what seems to have happened to Mr. Leigh Stafford's revue. At Hammersmith almost its only recommenda tion was that it brought ...

... 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 ...

... THROUGHOUT the years of the war a distinguished woman writer in South Africa was keeping a diary, and it was in every essential a war diary, for it recorded, with the detachment of distance but with the clarity of a good observer, the most significant details of the war news as it was published, and as it was interpreted to her by her friend, Field Marshal Smuts. The writer was Mrs. Sarah ...

... Rupert Croft-Cooke STORM AT THE HOOK.-- This is one of those novels, fashionable in the 'thirties, which are written to a precise blue print, the result of much careful ingenuity rather than of imagination or even inventive ness. A storm delays seven people who are anxious to reach England from Holland. And if you remember Grand Hotel and Stam boul Train and all the other novels which ...

... The Story of Hampstead. By J. H. Preston. (Staples Press 8s. 6d.) Topographical and historical details, illus trated by photographs of the Mayor and her husband, the Vicar, Madge the Flower Seller, and Dr. Cyril Joad. A bit much. it The Bright and the Dark. By John Frederic Gibson. (Sampson Low 8s. 6d.) A staccato story of life in a Cornish village. Death in Shallow Water. By Miles Burton. ...

... AT exactly the right moment Mr. John Arlott has pro duced an excellent book on The Classics of Cricket, FROM HAMBLEDON TO LORD'S (Christopher Johnson, 10s. 6d.), and his introduction to each of the four essays on the art, prac tice and history of the game are as welcome as his familiar voice, which we hear so often in the cricket season by courtesy of the B.B.C. Being himself a distinguished ...