... Elizabeth Bewehs WHAT would you do if, out of the blue one morning, you got a letter inviting your child to become a film star? The flat in the big block overlooking the village in Piccadilly had throughout the whole war survived bombing: it was in this same flat, at breakfast-time, in July of a year ago, that a very different bombshell was to explode. Dear Madam, said this letter (more or ...

... RECORD DF THE WEEK TWO years ago saxophonist Reggie Goff was playing with the B.B.C. Dance Orchestra. At that time he had no idea of becoming a singer. When he left the B.B.C. however, he took lessons and began to concentrate on his singing, on the advice of a friend. Now his first record has been released here. On it he sings I Don't Care What They Say and When You 're in Lore, accom panied ...

... f^4etc/i -ffiocA BEVERLEY BAXTER. A STOCKBROKER friend of mine has decided that he will become a farmer in Ireland. Being a man of action, he is tired of playing dominoes with his partners while they wait for the telephone to get over its sulk and start speaking again. I gather that it is not so much a desire on his part to milk cows or feed pigs as it is to gaze upon dusk as it descends on ...

... EVER since the inception of the Fabian Society, the Labour movement has not lacked intellectuals, and throughout its growth has been nourished and sustained by many skilled dialecticians who could command a reading public. Even more valuable has been the type of scholar not lacking in the common touch who could put the views of the comrades over to the community. Mr. Francis Williams was for ...

... WHEN bad men combine, the good men asso ciate, wrote Burke, and that might be taken as the motif of THE WEST AT BAY (Allen and Unwin. 12s. 6d.), a survey of our present situation by that brilliant young economist, Miss Barbara Ward. Starting with the premise that no corner of the world except perhaps Ancient Greece has contributed as much as Western Europe to the development and enrichment ...

... IN the ten years after 1915 there was a migration in American literature from the villages and the small towns into the big cities, and of this migration there were five chief pioneers: Sherwood Anderson, H. L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather and Scott Fitzgerald. This is the thesis of Mr. Maxwell Geismar, who, in The Last of the Provincials (Seeker and War burg. 16s.), analyses the work ...

... Esther waters. Well-meaning but scrappy version of the George Moore novel, about the fall and rise of a Victorian servant-girl, who is seduced by and marries a horsey gentleman. Considered daring a couple of generations ago, the piece now wears an air of gentle tedium. With Kathleen Ryan, Dirk Bogarde, Cyril Cusack, Fay Compton. the weaker sex.-- Film version of Esther McCrackcn's No Medals, ...

... GUS THE GREAT. By Thomas W. Duncan. Sampson Low 12s. 6 d.) THE GOLDEN SLEEP. By Vivian Connell. (Seeker and Warburg 10s. 6 d.) EMILY. By James Hanley. (Nicholson and Watson 8s. 6 d.) COMMENTS ON CAIN. By F. Tennyson Jesse. (Heinemann 10s. 6d.) OUR REVIEWER'S CHOICE Rupert Croft-Cooke GUS THE GREAT.-- This is a huge novel which justifies its own size by sheer hard-working narration. It is ...

... . By Martin Weed 011. (Barker 10s. 6d.) Day-to-day diary kept by the author while he was a prisoner of the Japanese. Detailed and factual, it could have made the basis of an interesting book. BOOKS IN BRIEF ...

... it . it Day, Another Dollar. By John T. Winterich. (Benn 9s. 6d.) Winterich. (Benn 9s. 6d.) And another story of an American boyhood, this time in Providence, Rhode Island, in the first decade of this century. ...

... . ft By Frank Singleton. (Chatto and Windus 8s. 6d.) A bad title for a good book. A woman supposes that she is responsible for the death of a boisterous young blackguard and so pieces together the story of his life and death. The whole thing is excellently conceived and written. ...

... (t$7 ^tfuuCkj^ Saloon Bar (Garrick) Anthony Cookman with Tom Titt A SALOON bar should always (to my think ing) be a survival from the past. The past need not be very remote and I have no romantic allegiance to oak beams, but it should be at least far enough away for us to feel that we have by happy chance cast anchor for a brief while in a cosier age than our own. The saloon bar of the Cap ...