... . 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 ...

... .-- -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 ...

... .- --A not-quite-successful attempt to carry Margaret u Brien over tne awkward age between childhood and adolescence, with slightly self-conscious charm and etiolated Technicolor. J4. ...

... . By Neaio Marsh. (The Crime Club 9s. 6 d.) IT is from just such ornate and outré fal-lals as Mr. Brooke's that I expect to find an escape in crime fiction, but in this case I find myself bewildered by another kind of firework. Why, I cannot help asking, does Miss Marsh rob her story of all probability by a cast of characters so eccentric and puppet-like that no one could seriously pretend to ...

... 8 y Collie Knox I FIRST met Cecil Beaton in the Adriatic. Venturing too far on a swim from my base in Yugoslavia, I was failing visibly. Was there no Weissmuller in the sea that morning? There was A clear, incisive voice cried Hold on I'm with you. Swimming with the ease and grace of a champion, up popped Mr. Beaton, the darling of the photographic gods. Resolute, calm and with, of course, ...

... .' A minor Treasure of sierra Maare, well done, with a good many novel twists, about nine men and a woman who dig for buried gold in the shifting sand-dunes of the Mexican border. With Ella Raines, Randolph Scott, John Ireland. ...