... By C. A. Lejeune THE best detectives (except in fiction) are inconspicuous. The best criminals, as G. K. Chesterton has pointed out, are invisible men. The best actors sink their personality in their parts. The best directors of entertainment submerge themselves as entertainers in the work with which they entertain. England's Number One film director, Carol Reed, has become the great man that ...

... . By Margarec Goldsmith. lEvans 9s. 6d.) Biographical sketches of Frederick the Great, Maria Theresa of Austria, and Catherine the Great. ...

... 44 DARK OF THE MOON I FIRST heard the name of Peter Brook on a night five years ago when he produced Cocteau's The Infernal Machine on the tea-tray stage of the Chanticleer in Kensington. Not long before, he had packed Marlowe's Faustus upon the even smaller stage of the Torch-- say a medium-size luggage-label. The Cocteau had moments of surprising invention: it was clear that we had in ...

... . Rupert Croft- Cooke By Bernard Shaw. Constable 7s. 6d.) THE historical analogy for Mr. Shaw is with Moses. As the great Judaic liberator brought his people out of slavery, Mr. Shaw has delivered us from the yoke of rusty conventions and shibboleths. But his work has always given me the keenest sympathy with the Israelites who for forty-odd years had to put up with-- in addition to sandflies ...

... By John Dickson Carr. Murray 18s.) MR. CARR has devoted all his talent as a novelist to creating a character, and in that he has succeeded. After reading his book one knows, intimately and with respect, the Conan Doyle whom Mr. Carr himself knows. Whether one knows the Conan Doyle who lived at Hindhead is another matter. The biography is written almost in the form of a nove There will be many ...

... Elizabeth Havens IT'S exciting to welcome back C. H. B. Kitchin --from whom we have not had a book for too long. His name has never been out of mind with those who care for writing and watch to see what the modern novel can do-- for Mr. Kitchin was for ever tapping around the edge of new possibilities. He searches life like someone searching a room-- sounding the walls for hollows, looking ...

... Book Reviews Aollekens and His Times The People Opposite Handle in Springtime Wisteria t'ottagre Chinese Kseapade NOLLEKENS AND HIS TIMES may, I should suggest, be the world's most devastating biography: if it has, as to this particular, runners-up, I should like to meet them. The work is the product of the master-pupil relation ship, with all the chances of scrutiny from the junior side, ...

... PRODWTTS GUIDE TO WRITING. Edited by C. E. Vulliamy. Michael Joseph 8s. 6 d.) Giles bendigo prodwit was too good to be true. His portrait makes a frontis piece to this book of his remains, and one can only wish that it had been drawn from life. Such a pothouse personality would have enlivened even the 1920's, the period of his imaginary maturity. From behind his stalwart shoulders Mr. ...

... . By Jocelyn Brooke. (The Hodley Head 7s. 6 d.) I MUST confess to a certain disappointment in Mr. Jocelyn Brooke's new book. It is a long short-story about an orphan boy who goes to live with his uncle, a struggling gentle man farmer. The boy is neurotic and tearful, the uncle appárently a good horsey type who wants to make a man of his nephew. Duncan, the boy, is soon aware of something ...

... . By Mary Roberts Rinehart. Cassell 9s. 6 d.) Carol Spencer, an attractive and highly- finished product of New- York city, has the un enviable task of opening up a family country house. We see her first with her mother, a promising character, a selfish hypo chondriac who unfortun ately disappears from the story after page 8. Carol finds evidence that some one has been in the house and is told ...

... . By Eric Romilly. (Chapman and Hall 9s. 6 d.) There is nothing quite so painful as a fantasy in fiction which does not quite come off, a humorous novel which turns out to be merely facetious. All the reader's condolences are with the author because it seems that he has undertaken an impossible task to make a fairy story real, to produce a level of humour which escapes silliness. I felt a ...

... . By Sven Berlin. I (Nicholson and Watson 21s.) THE subject of this lavishly-illustrated bio graphy was, Mr. Sven Berlin assares us, one of the best painters in England,]' a genuine primitive who died in 1942. Some fifty of his paintings are reproduced here, and I must confess to critical cecity, for to me they have none of the qualities of the true primitive except the lack of any ...