... 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 ...

... 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 ...

... LOWLAND LAIRDS The Scottish Scene Through Three Centuries With his lives of William Wallace and Alexander III, James Fergusson, biographer and historian, acquitted himself well in a conventional manner, but infinitely more revealing in its portrayal of Scottish life, more charged with authentic atmosphere, is his series of essays on LOWLAND LAIRDS (Faber and Faber. 16s.). Mr. Fergusson, who ...

... 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 ...

... A MAN with a genius for friendship would be one way, and a good way, of de scribing Dr. Harry Roberts, one of the liveliest figures of our times, who died only three years ago, and whose interests, all of which seemed equally strong, were not only medicine, but gardening, talking and politics. Harry Roberts was the most rational rationalist and the most democratic democrat I have ever known, ...

... LIKE all the admirers of Miss I. Compton-Burnett's novels, I like to think that I have a special appreciation of them, and so I opened TWO WORLDS AND THEIR WAYS (Gollancz. IOS. 6d.) with the keenest anticipation. At its end, I was not entirely dis appointed, because there is an inimitable art here; but, frankly, I had not enjoyed myself as much as 1 had hoped. Her books, of which 1 have a ...