... . By L. Luard. (Nicholson and Watson 15s.) A good miscellany of Commander Luard's writings over many years about little ships. BOOKS IN BRIEF ...

... WHEN a novel is as good as Norman Collins's London Belongs to Me, probably the safest way of bringing it to the screen is to tick as closely as possible to the author's blue prints. Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, who Produced the new British film at the Leicester square, have done just this. To be sure, Mr. Collins saw his dramatis persona: om a rather longer viewpoint, and in more ...

... (bt Anthony Cookman with Tom Titt Edinburgh Festival Plays EDINBURGH'S leading newspaper used to carry on Saturday mornings three crowded columns of church advertise ments. Flippant Englishmen, comparing this noble sight with the meagre column in which plays and concerts were announced, professed to have hit upon the city's real idea of entertainment. The second Festival, even more lavish than ...

... Books Reviewed by Trevor Allen YOU have to hand it to the Fat Girl. She was Sophie Abuza, waitress and washer-up in her parents' restaurant at Hartford. She carolled to the customers, then at local concerts, stormed New York's Tin Pan Alley, and in due time became the famous Sophie Tucker, to whom a rich sheik who beheld the most beautiful lady I have ever seen in the film Honky Tonk wrote: ...

... Elizabeth Beivens The Blood of Other* The Secret Thread Malice Bite* Back The Ola** Room The Blood of Others, by Simone de Beauvoir (Seeker and Warburg; ios. 6d.), has been described by its publishers as the greatest novel to come out of the French Resistance. It is, at the outset, to be distin guished from the by now typical, though admirable, Resistance novel, in that the Resistance ...

... OF tfe- ^t&uJFZ Anthony Cookman with Tom Titt A Fine Othello at Stratford MR. GODFREY TEARLE'S Othello-- the great event of the most distinguished of recent festivals at Stratford-upon- Avon-- is a strange performance. It flies in the face of all received notions of how Othello should be played, yet compels belief. Is not the Moor Shakespeare's supreme orator With the speeches given him have ...

... . By Shelley Smith. (Collins Crime Club 8s. 6 d.) A good thriller. But the publishers say that this penetrating psychological study has the dram atic intensity of Zola's Thercse Raquin. Really, a ...

... . it By Cecilie Leslie. (Cassell 12s. 6 d.) The Indian's love of metaphor has let him in for this quite silly piece of melodrama among the memsahibs. The author solemnly describes the actual sacrifice of a goat. ...

... Susannah Sings. w By Maxine Hewson. (Peter Davies 9s. bd.) Spirited tale of a girl's rise to stardom and a wedding in one of London's biggest churches. ...

... SARABAND FOR DEAD LOVERS. A Conscientious Technicolor romance based on Helen Simpson's version of the Koenigsmark story which has ex cluded sensationalism so rigorously that in the end it manages to be just a little plodding. It has breeding, however, and, whenever Franfoise Rosay is on the screen, a natural magnificence. Joan Greenwood and Stewart Granger suggest what the star-crossed lovers ...

... OF all the rôles an actor has to attempt in his career, that of a downright good man is probably the most difficult. Almost any talented actor can make a sinner interesting, but it is the very devil to play a saint. Goodness, real goodness, is a quality that defeats exhibition ism, for the true heart of goodness is humility. It is in its achievement of the portrait of a man who was at once ...

... OUR BOOKSHELF Rupert Croft-Cooke OUR REVIEWER'S CHOICE THE STREAM THAT STOOD STILL. By Beverley Nichols. Cape 8s. 6 d.) LITTLE I UNDERSTOOD. By Joanna Cannan (Gollancz 8s. 6 ...