... 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. ...

... . By John and Emery Bonnett. Michael Joseph ;8s. 6 d.) This is a reviewer's paradise-- a convincing novel about a murdered writer. ...

... by Ray Allister (Deputising for Robert Done, on holiday.) OF two October plays, one was right for television; the other was just right. I want to demonstrate the world of difference between their qualifications. It 's a honey of a play. We were talking three weeks before the play was produced. The speaker was Royston Morley, senior television drama producer, and the honey was Frank Tilsley's ...

... WE 'LL HEAR. -A PLAY. By J. C. Trewin. (Carroll and Nicholson 12s. 6 d.) MY colleague, Mr. J. C. Trewin, has an inveterate love of apt quotation-- no the thumbed phrases that are pulled by the hair out of dictionaries of Quotations and dumped down in the text, but those supremely right yet somehow unanticipated sentence which fit his text without strain. I find this gift for quotation an ...

... . by Rupert Croft-Cooke By Marguerite Steen. (Collins 12s. 6 d.) THIS novel is planned and executed in the heroic tradition. Like Miss Steen's earlier book, The Sun is My Undoing, it has a central character who sees and does, knows, feels and dares, while around him is an ever-changing panorama of scene and character. It is thus in the main stream of English fiction, in direct descent from the ...

... . By Marghanita L'aski. Cresset Press 9s. 6d.) THIS is the straightforward stor of Hilary Wainwright's journe to France in 1945 to find his sma son, who had been lost during th Occupation. It is a good idea, and Miss Las! has handled it with some skill, but it lel me thinking, not without exasperation, ho\ much better it could have been. Wainwrigh himself is stuffy and starched and only reall ...

... 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 ...

... 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 ...

... PROUST AM) THE DUKE Elizabeth Boiven IF I had known that he would become famous, exclaimed a lady, naively, I would not have thrown away his letters! How vexatious for her. She spoke of Marcel Proust-- who is the subject of Princess Marthe Bibesco's The Veiled Wanderer (Falcon Press; 7s. 6d.). The young man, at once known and unknown-- known as a wit, a character; un known in that his ...

... .-- -A very moving film indeed, about men of the Burma Army in a hospital shack in the jungle, with a startlingly accurate performance from Richard Todd, British screen newcomer. FILMS IN BRIEF ...

... . By C. P. Snow. by Rupert Croft-Cooke Faber and Faber 12s. 6 d.) DURING the second decade of this century and for some years after wards, a great number of books were published which told, with laboured details of background, the story of a man's youth. Some of them followed Mr. Compton Mackenzie and described this in a public-school and university setting; others were indebted to Mr. Gilbert ...

... . By Dennis Gray Stoll. Collancz 9s. 6d.) A rambling and shapeless novel set in India, of which country the author writes with infectious nostalgia. Books in Brief ...