... 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: ...

... 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 ...

... Cafalina A Candle for St. Jude I Lore Miss Tilli Bean The Black Piano Elizabeth Bewetis SOMERSET MAUGHAM'S Catalina (Heinemann; IOS. 6 d.) is a romance, set in sixteenth century Spain. The heroine becomes a celebrity at sixteen-- she is the subject of a miracle. She remains a celebrity, into her later life, for a different reason: she is a famous actress. Her honeymoon is supervised by Don ...

... WALTER PATER, that master stylist, whose impeccably brilliant prose was the result of a polishing and a repolishing that continued until his acutely critical ear was satisfied, was undoubtedly a great humanist; but somehow his sonorous sentences tend to lack reality and freshness the farther they diverge from sim plicity, and thus wearying himself in the pursuit of vain perfection, as Edmund ...

... (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 ...

... Book Reviews Elizabeth Bmtetis Yonrn Faithfully Of Wife* and Wiving British Boxing YOURS FAITHFULLY (John Long; 12s. 6d.) is Leslie Henson's autobiography. Sel dom has title been better found-- for seldom has any artist dealt more faithfully with his public. Leslie Henson can only not be described as an institution because of his quick-silver quality-- the word institution suggests ...

... 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 ...

... . 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 ...

... 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 ...

... . . Compiled by Gerald Brod- ribb. (Hollis and Carter ros. 6d.) (Hollis and Carter ros. 6d.) A Cricket anthology which omits Erancis Thompson's poem At Lord's. ...

... Cb(r An English Summer (Lyric, Hammersm ith Anthony Cookman with Tom Titt IF in re-creating for playgoers the atmo sphere of the Battle of Britain you succeed as a reporter the question whether you have also managed to write a good play is of secondary importance. Those who say that you haven't will be reckoned-- perhaps even by themselves-- of a pedantic turn of mind. Mr. Ronald Adam ...