... . By John Connell. (Constable 21s.) IT would be a cruel and sweeping criticism to say of this book that it will be of interest chiefly to Stevensonians, but it would not be altogether untrue. Henley means little to the present age except as a man whose name appears in the index of almost every literary biography of his period. Of his own work no more than a few stanzas survive, and they have ...

... Elizabeth Botvcn OF Harold Nicolson's Benjamin Constant (Constable; 18s.) the publishers say: The book is more than a portrait of an individual: it is a sketch of an age. This is true-- and, further, it is a fact that the com bination of an extraordinary character with an epoch which (if less noisy) was not less momen tous than our own provides Mr. Nicolson with a quite perfect subject. We ...

... Elizabeth Botven MARGHANITA LASKI'S flair for a subject amounts to genius-- she showed that at her debut with Love on the Super-tax. She has done it again with Little Boy Lost (Cresset Press; 9s. 6d.). This may seem cold- blooded praise for a deeply-moving novel-- the most moving, its publishers opine, to appear for years, perhaps since Dickens. Something better than flair has directed ...

... (tt Failing Mansion A ii (hour Cookman WHEN a dramatist sets out to pour intellectual scorn on the gods for their seeming hatred of romantic lovers it is important that the audience should like the lovers. Unless we feel that something fine has perished with them we may well end up on the side of the gods. It is extremely difficult for us to sympathize with Desmond and Maura as we sympathize ...

... top o' the morning. One fine Irish morning somebody steals the Blarney Stone and Bing Crosby as an insurance investigator from America, and Barry Fitzgerald as a local police j sergeant, unite to find it. The script is gracefully written, and the whole thing has a little touch of green magic. j dear mr. prohack. Arnold Bennett's cautionary tale about the awful things that happen to a Civil ...

... I am given to understand that on rarely hears verse spoken at a corktai party not more than half-a-dozei times a year at the outside. But whei T. S. Eliot is the host, anything can happen. In this strangi affair, which begins with one party and ends with another, hi has written a play of which Edinburgh has been talking nineteer to the dozen. London before Christmas should be talking of il ...

... THE UNDERCOVER MAN.' Intelligent semi- documentary about a Government agent who is out to catch a big-time gangster on a 3,000,000- dollar income-tax evasion. Sound, firm, Ameri can stuff, with Glenn Ford, the mail-order Muni. ...

... CHICAGO DEADLINE. Alan Ladd in a com plicated but fairly original thriller, about a reporter who delves into the past of a dead girl, and has to shoot his way out of trouble. ...

... TRAIN OF EVENTS. Four short stories, some grim, some gay, bringing the protagonists to gether in a train crash between Euston and Liverpool. The direction, by four hands, is uneven, but you will find something, somewhere, to warrant the price of admission. Jack War ner, Valerie Hobson, John Clements are my buy. FILMS IN BRIEF ...

... . By Ian Niall. (Heinemann 8s. 6d.) MR. NIALL is one of the most interesting writers to have appeared since the war. His first novel. No Resting Place, a harsh and realistic story about Scots' tinkers, gained immediate attention, and his second, Tune on a Melodeon, dealt with people no less brutish and was quite as effective. Now he has produced a story of another sort. FoxhoIIow is an ...

... . By Robert Finnegan. (The Bodley Head 8s. 6 ...

... . By Barbara Anderson. (Gollancz I Os. 6 d.) The American colour problem again in a long, straggling novel about a pianist whose mother is a negress and father an unidentified white man. ...