... WAGHORN'S WAY The Pioneer of the Overland Mail As late as the third decade of the nineteenth century the conveyance of mail between London and Bombay was a business of fantastic difficulty. Between Bombay and Suez the steamers were hopelessly inadequate, and had to be crammed even to the Saloon with coal to ensure that they would get the 1,710 miles into Aden, the longest leg of the journey. ...

... THE fourth volume of Mr. Sean O'Casey's memoirs is as rich and tempestuous read ing as its predecessors; reward ing, but a little headachey in the long run. INISHFALLEN FARE THEE WELL (Macmillan. 16s.) opens in Dublin in the days of the throubles and the Black and Tans, and ends with the author's leaving Ireland for England, where he has now lived for many years. It is a book whose quality ...

... THE romantic approach is used in fiction perhaps more often than strictly neces sary, and certainly this is true of that form of fiction, the historical novel, a dangerously vague term in itself. There seems to be something particu larly tempting in trying this kind of approach in writing of the late eighteenth century, and the very early nineteenth century. vvnetner it is tne iteign 01 terror ...

... THE POE CENTENARY The Anthology of a Tragic Genius A writer whose successors include Dorothy Sayers (creator of Lord Peter Wimsey), Jules Verne (exponent of the scientific romance) and Stephane Mallarmé (the French poet and leader of the Symbolists), was nothing if not versatile. Edgar Allan Poe, the centenary of whose death is recalled this month, was in his own day supreme as an inventor of ...

... THE divine Sarah is an excellent subject for a biography; volatile, uncon ventional, world-famous to this day and spectacular in her own. Sarah Bernhardt (Hurst and Blackett. 21s.) is her story as told by her granddaughter, and it is not only a record of her stage triumphs, but a fairly intimate account of her not very private life. Even as a child Bernhardt was tempestuous and was already ...

... THIS has been a rich week for novels and a busy one for women writers, who are respon sible for nine of the books under review. In the historical field, the stories range from a frontier town in the 90's to Israel in the ninth century B.C., and in the modern field they cover Italy, Africa, Assam and the west coast of Ireland, as well as the English countryside and our familiar London. To begin ...

... FRESH from her success with The Pursuit of Love, Miss Nancy Mitford continues her triumphant way to best- sellerdom with Love in a COLD CLIMATE (Hamish Hamilton. 8s. 6d.), already thrice chosen, by two newspapers and the Book Society. I he daughter 01 tne now iarnous noirer reus the story. Several of our old ■friends are still around notahlv Fa playing his loud gramophone, describing his ...

... TWO MEN WHO MET KING LOBENGULA The African Journals of a Bishop and a Financier Lobengula, savage King of the Matabele, who stood alike in the path of the missionary and the seeker after gold, who for a brief moment checked the acquisitive course of Empire, is revealed from two highly different viewpoints in two journals which are published this week within the same volume. The joint title is ...

... WITH IRELAND REVISITED (Hutchinson. 16s.) Mr. Charles Graves gives us what amounts to a chronicle of delights. From the first steak in Dublin, to the last bowl of cream or glass of good sherry, Mr. Graves writes with the enthusiasm of the born gour met, as well as with the perti nacity of the born fact-finder. With his wife he recently motored 2,000 miles round and about in Eire, observing, ...

... ALTHOUGH he is known in this country as the author of Adolphe, a work which took him fifteen days out of a lifetime of sixty- three years, very little is known or recognised about the career or the character of BENJAMIN CONSTANT (Con stable. 18s.), and Mr. Harold Nicolson has admirably re paired this gap in our knowledge, or has at least given the opportunity for repairing it, in his ...

... TRUE courage, wrote La Rochefoucauld, is to do without witnesses every thing that one is capable of doing before all the world. In prisons throughout France, including the redoubtable Fresnes, in Ravensbruck con centration camp, and in a house in the elegant Avenue Foch in Paris, Mrs. Peter Churchill, then Odette Sansom, was to bear out the truth of those words from the day in April 1943, ...

... EVERYONE who read and enjoyed Sir Patrick Hast ings' autobiography, and a great many people appear to have done so, will welcome CASES IN COURT (Heinemann. 15s.), in which this great advocate reviews twenty- one of his most famous cases, ranging from the notorious trial of Bob Sievier to the Laski case. Sir Patrick Hastings calls these reminiscences, and he sets them down, each from the ...