... MR. JAMES BRIDIE, who has written many plays for our delight and instruction, as well as being distinguished in the world of medicine, has been writing letters to Mr. Moray McLaren, whose name will be familiar to B.B.C. listeners and to the discriminating among readers of contemporary letters. Mr. McLaren nas neen wntme back to him, and the subject of their correspondence is the English. They ...

... I FOUND Miss Frances War field's autobiography, THERE'S NO NEED TO SHOUT (Gollancz. 8s. 6d.), quite the most enchanting thing I read this week, in its humour, its honesty and the underlying pathos which is never allowed to intrude or to set the mood for the life-story. Miss Warfield, who is still young, writes of the central fact of her existence, which might have turned that life into a ...

... A POINT which seems to be missed by most modern novelists is that members of a business partnership are apt to see more of each other than they do of their wives and families. In the firm of Williams and Pilkington this was even more so, as both partners belonged to the same club and, since one of them is married to the sister of the other, they saw quite a lot of each other at home as well. ...

... THE REFORMER'S PATH A New Biography of Shaftesbury There is a time to be born, and a time to die-- this we readily concede. But is there not also a time to live? Thus spoke the young Lord Ashley, later to be seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, a prince among reformers, a never-failing fount of philanthropy, as he addressed Parliament upon the Factory Act of 1844. Shaftesbury was born in 1801, in ...

... IN the early days of the French Revolution, and before the fall of the Bastille, Mirabeau wrote: It will be to the glory of France and of our selves that this great Revolu tion is costing humanity neither penalties nor tears. History has related only too often actions like those of wild beasts, among whom heroes have been few and far between let us hope that we are beginning the history of ...

... I SUPPOSE that to a truly Welsh reader, Welsh by birth and upbringing, there would be nothing fantastic about the novel ALL THINGS BETRAY THEE (Michael Joseph. 10s. 6d.). But to an English reader, even though he can see the integral value of the book, it remains surprising: violent in one direction, lush in another. It takes a little while, for instance, to accustom one's ear to the lilt of ...

... FROM England, America and Russia-via-America come this week's impressive collection of novels, most of which deal with our own times, or times within living memory, even if their themes are not familiar in our own experience. Mr. Christo pher Morley, for instance, has written of an endearing and at the same time exasDeratine character, his own version of Everyman, in The Man Who Made Friends ...

... THE scope of Mrs. Markoo sha Fischer's novel. THE NAZAROVS (Gollancz. 12s. 6d.), is very wide, as it embraces not only the Russian scene from 1905 to the end of the Moscow siege in the last war, but also the rise, fall and renascence of a Russian family, together with their husbands and wives and some of their dependants. Nevertheless, the storv is not confused and the author has been able to ...

... IF DELIGHT (Heinemann. 1os. 6d.) had been by Logan Pearsall Smith or George Saints bury, or even by one of those leaders of literary fashion who achieve fame by producing a book once in twenty years, it assuredly would be being acclaimed on those esoteric planes encompassed by the middle pages of the literary weeklies, the largest slab of the one page devoted to books in the Sunday newspapers, ...

... IT seems that a number of very talented people have spent the past year in assembling their memories, their notebooks and their journals in order to give us, the readers, the benefit of their experiences and their comments, more or less articulate and subtle, on those events. Professional writers, which sometimes seems to me like a redundant title, political commentators, travellers, and just ...

... . A New Romantic Anthology (The Grey Walls Press. 10s. 6d.), compiled by Stefan Schiman- slci and Henry Treece, covers the romantic revival in writing, during the war years, and includes an essav on Romanticism bv Herbert Read, as well as contributions by a number of distinguished writers. The animals and plants which inhabit our sea shores provide material for a fascinating hook by Professor ...

... WHAT a fruitful field for speculation is a literary collaboration! Who, for instance, writes what piece or pieces, and what happens when they disagree, as often they must? For our entertainment, Mr. Malcolm Muggeridge creates Anthony Anstruther, a successful collaboration in thrillers. One half, Ossian Routledge, expires drama- ticallv in the British Museum. As it turns out, the other half, ...