... THE COMPLEAT ANGLER, OR THE CONTEMPLATIVE MAN'S RECREA TION, by Izaak Walton. Messrs. Vane have published a most attrac tive reprint of this classic for the reasonable price of 8s. 6d. The charm and elegance of the seven teenth century which Izaak Walton recalls for us are fittingly introduced by the designs from the first edition reproduced on the dust-sheet and title-page. The Countryman ...

... Reviewed by Trevor Allen AS a boy comedian touring with a juvenile pantomime company Georgie Wood overheard people say: Oh yes, he's all right now, but wait until he grows up! What if he suddenly sprouted like Jack's Beanstalk, became tall and thin like Carlton the Human Hairpin? Every night he prayed: Please, God, don't let me grow up. But he need not have worried, for his fate was in the ...

... Rupert Croft-Cooke OTHER VOICES, OTHER ROOMS.-- All three of the novels which I am reviewing this week are American, and they represent an answer to the confused argu ment that British publishers are neglecting the home product for imported mediocrities. None of them is a masterpiece, but one feels with each of them that its author might achieve something really important. Too many of our ...

... WHEN a man has a brilliant legal reputation, great wit and an inexplicable modesty, it is likely that the story of his life will be worth telling, and if by himself, then well told. THE AUTO BIOGRAPHY OF SIR PATRICK HASTINGS (Heinemann. 15s.) therefore is a very successful undertaking and a book that is thoroughly satisfying to read. Sir Patrick's device is that On est comme on est, a ...

... At The Theatre Home Is To-morrow (Cambridge) Antlionr Cookman MR. PRIESTLEY is the H. G. Wells of the theatre. His admirers want him to go on writing about people. Perversely, to their thinking, he fixes his eye on peoples. Wells left the recognizable human world of Mr. Lewisham, Uncle Ponderevo and Mr. Polly for the arid mind (which he called a world) of William Clissold. Mr. Priestley, ...

... At The Pictures Songs of the Rope Freda Bruce Lockliart HITCHCOCK'S much-heralded and technically revolutionary Rope (Carlton) and Have- lock-Allan's gentler The Small Voice (Plaza) have a number of points in common. Both, for a start, are excellently entertaining pictures. Both give opportunities to young players who rise to them Joan Chandler in Rope James Donald and Harold Keel (late of ...

... Elizabeth Hewens The Conspirator Maidens' Trip Taken at the Flood The Best of Beardsley THE CONSPIRATOR, a novel by Humphrey Slater (John Lehmann; 8s. 6d.), is described on its wrapper as having a new and startling theme. This is no over statement: we are to deal, in fact, with the fortunes, marriage and general outlook of Major Desmond Ferneaux-Lightfoot, Grenadier Guards, who is ...

... (fcfa IT is indeed autumn with the Old Vic: its laurels, won so magnificently but a short while since, are falling fast. The season opened with a travesty of Twelfth Might which was at best amusing, continued with a Dr. Faustus which disastrously reduced the mighty line of Marlowe to flat prose and now, in The Way of the World, contrives to floodlight the admitted weakness of Congreve's ...

... At The Pictures It u sin e ii s Holiday Fmlii Bruce Lorkliari TOO often, to comment that a comedy must have been enormous fun to make suggests that it is much less fun to see. I can imagine how Burgess Meredith, co-producer and star, and directors King Vidor and Leslie Fenton enjoyed making On Our Merry Way (London Pavilion). They and Dorothy Lamour, Henry Fonda, James Stewart, and Paulette ...

... Audrey Lucas's Ego 9 The Case of Mr.. Crump Byron The Bark Wheel THE scene is a bar at Cannes during the Film Festival of 1946. An unpleasantness has started among the customers somebody saying that any Frenchman who allowed himself to submit to Buchenwald was un liche. This was violently resented by two ex-Buchenwalders. Things were beginning to look ugly, when the barman rapped on the ...

... an act of murder. Extremely painful but unusually adult Hollywood picture, concerned with the problem of mercy killing. the small voice. An out-of-the-ordinary film about a nice young couple idly contem plating divorce, who are brought to their senses by three escaped convicts at the business end of a gun. Something a little special. larceny. Slick, hard, bright Hollywood piece about an ...

... INCONTESTABLY the most important book of the week, and possibly of the month, is Mr. Robert Sher wood's THE WHITE HOUSE PAPERS OF HARRY L. HOPKINS (Eyre and Spottiswoode. 25s.). This first volume (another is promised for next spring) takes the reader from September 1939 to January 1942, and its great value is the intimate picture it gives of the relation ships of the great men of the period. ...