... 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 ...

... THE Pre-Raphaelites are having a renascence of popularity, at least in so far as literary discussions of their work are concerned, and Professor Oswald Doughty's important new volume on Dante Gabriel Rossetti is yet another step in the re discovery of that remarkable and vital group of poets and painters. A Victorian Romantic I (Frederick Muller. 25s.) is literally a ponderous volume in its ...

... 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. ...

... IF DELIGHT (Heinemann. 1os. 6d.) had been by Logan Pearsall Smith or George Saints bury, or even by one of those leaders of literary fashion who achieve fame by producing a book once in twenty years, it assuredly would be being acclaimed on those esoteric planes encompassed by the middle pages of the literary weeklies, the largest slab of the one page devoted to books in the Sunday newspapers, ...

... IT seems that a number of very talented people have spent the past year in assembling their memories, their notebooks and their journals in order to give us, the readers, the benefit of their experiences and their comments, more or less articulate and subtle, on those events. Professional writers, which sometimes seems to me like a redundant title, political commentators, travellers, and just ...

... THERE can be no doubt but that the publication of Mr. Somerset Maugham's A WRITER'S NOTEBOOK (Heine mann. 12s. 6d.) is a literary event of the first importance. Whatever contemporary criticism may say of the content of his novels, short stories, plays and belles-lettres, it is unanimously agreed that, in his profession, Mr. Somerset Maugham is the greatest craftsman of his day. Readers of The ...