... WHAT sort of a man was the great John Pierpont Morgan, that grandee of Ameri can finance, in his day the most influential banker in the world, whose enormous transactions in the last years of the nineteenth century and before the First World War were the talk of the Western World? John K. Winkler's lively Morgan the Magnificent, published in 1931, was entertaining enough, but it was hardly a ...

... LIFE WITH FATHER Hilda Brighten Tells the Story of Edgar Cohen primitive life on a Georgia small-holding and in a neighbouring mill town. In May 1933 the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice sought to ban God's Little Acre on an obscenity charge. The American publishers, Viking Press, fought the charge on the ground that the book was an honest work of literature. As a result of the ...

... KEEPERS OF YOUTH Mass Observation's Alarming Document Avoiding sensationalism at all costs, sticking closely to unadorned facts, checking and rechecking the reports of others, Mass Observation, described as an independent sociological research unit, now comes out with its important REPORT ON JUVENILE DELINQUENCY (The Falcon Press. 7s. 6d.) It is a thoroughly alarming document and, as Tom ...

... MISS ANNE CRONE'S name is one to remember. She is a new writer and an important one, whose first novel, BRIDIE STEEN (Heinemann. 1os. 6d.) shows a strong and original talent such as one does not meet every day or even every year. Miss Crone's work will inevitably be compared with Hardy's, for her writing has something of his uncompro mising force and passion, though her style is her own and ...

... THERE are at least two current views of Matthew Arnold. One is the poet of such power and sensibility, as is revealed in the sonnet Dover Beach, and the other is of a slightly stuffy Victorian who was an Inspector of Schools. Miss Isobel Macdonald has chosen a third and original view in her biography, THE BURIED SELF (Peter Davies. 12s. 6d.), which she describes as a background to his poems, ...

... DURING three years as a prisoner of the Japanese, Mr. Graham Hough read and re read the Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, and brought to their analytical study an intensity of concentration that must have been valuable to him at the time, and which has now resulted in THE LAST ROMANTICS (Duck worth. 15s.), a critical and thoughtful book of quite unusual merit. Among the poems, Mr. Hough had ...

... FITZGERALD'S UNFINISHED NOVEL The Story of a Hollywood Tycoon Just as Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis won fame as recorders of the American scene, the former in clumsy if vigorous native prose, the latter with no less genius and a little more polish, so did F. Scott Fitzgerald carve a niche for himself in the giddy '20's. Fitzgerald set down as he saw it the America of Harding and Calvin ...

... MR. NOEL LANGLEY'S new book is in a way a surprise, as it seems of such a different type from his other work, but perhaps his versa tility should have prepared one for surprises, and his delicately romantic version of the young love of Dante for Beatrice should only show a new facet of a remarkable talent. The In constant Moon (Arthur Bar ker. ios. 6d.) is a charming book, both to the mind and ...

... THE ART OF ITALO SVEVO The Stout Industrialist Who Wrote Novels in the Flaubert Manner The name of Italo Svevo, the stout and wealthy Triestine industrialist who sat at the feet of James Joyce in the first decade of the century, and who looked upon his own early attempts at novel-writing almost in the light of juvenile errors, is still known in England only to a small circle. It is seventeen ...

... Mainly for Boys Between io and 15 Years of Age. All Published by Hutchinson. Cowdog, by Ned Andrews, with illustrations by V. Anderson. (Cowboy Series. 4s. 6d.) Venture to the Main, by Leslie Morley, illustrated by F. A. Philpotts. (4s. 6d.) Ship Boy With Columbus, by Enid la Monte Meadowcroft, with illustrations by C. G. Rowlands. (5s.) Cowboy Boots, by Shannon Garst, illustrated by R. Mills. ...

... ANTIQUE DIVERSIONS An Important New Volume for the Collector Those treasures which Mrs. Malaprop called articles of bigotry and virtue, which are so hard to assess in the antique shop because our knowledge in the present genera tion is inclined to be lacking, provide the subject of an excellent new volume by G. Bernard Hughes entitled COLLECTING ANTIQUES (Country Life. £2 2s.). In his twenty ...

... There was a brilliant gathering at London's Guildhall for the presentation of the Grotius Medal to Mr. Churchill, and the actual presentation was made by Dr. Kappeyne van de Coppello, President of the Vereeniging voor Internationale, Rechstsorde, the Dutch equivalent of the United Nations Association. In his speech Mr. Churchill paid a deep tribute to Grotius, the far-sighted Dutchman. ...