... (Continued from page 34) must run with him to read, not languish lazily in fireside chair. His mission is to scorch and probe, not give you pipe-dreams. Frederic prokosch, who wrote The Asiatics, is novelist but poet, too. In Storm and Echo (Faber, 10s. 6d.) four men go on safari from Brazzaville in the Belgian Congo to Nagala, a peak feared by the natives. One is in search of a lost ...

... Elizabeth Bowen SOMERSET MAUGHAM'S A Writer's Notebook (Heinemann; 12s. 6 d.) is for everyone. For the writer, its value is obvious-- Mr. Maugham is known in literary ranks as being consistently generous to his own kind, and the publication of these jottings of his is, for his fellow-authors, a crowning good act. At the same time, there is nothing esoteric about the Notebook: from the point of ...

... Cbfr Top Slcro( {Wintor Caardcii) \ni lion v Cookmaii ALL well-acted farces are good, though some are better than others. On any less liberal view Mr. Alan Melville's Top Secret must be held to have but a poor chance of overcoming its initial handicaps. These handicaps are (1) the theatre is too big for it, (2) it was too long on the first night and a remarkably short-tempered gallery gave ...

... DURING three years as a prisoner of the Japanese, Mr. Graham Hough read and re read the Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, and brought to their analytical study an intensity of concentration that must have been valuable to him at the time, and which has now resulted in THE LAST ROMANTICS (Duck worth. 15s.), a critical and thoughtful book of quite unusual merit. Among the poems, Mr. Hough had ...

... THE THEATRE J. C. Trewin THE OLD VIC SEASON. If I say cautiously that the Old Vic's Love's Labour's Lost is the best I have seen in the West End, it is to show that I have not forgotten the Guthrie production of 1936 in the Waterloo Road, and a now celebrated Stratford revival (by Peter Brook) ten years later. But none would wish to grudge Hugh Hunt his first laurels as Director of the Vic; He ...

... . By Rebecca West. (Macmillan 18s.) THOSE of us who were at once robust and curious went off to the Central Criminal Court says Miss West in speaking of the trial of William Joyce. Robust and curious one must also be to read this book, for it is a study, piercing and sagacious, of that ugly phenomenon of the last war, the treachery of certain men who owed allegiance to the King and worked ...

... by Robert Dane FOR the past few weeks we have been divorced from a TV screen, living with friends and relations in the far north who still indulge in the quaint old custom of listening in. They seem, on the whole, well contented, these simple folk, to over hear a play or a variety bill as though they had been locked out of a theatre and forced to put their ear to a keyhole though around ...

... . By Upton Sinclair. (Werner Laurie 15s.) IT is difficult to say more of Mr. Upton Sinclair s latest addition to the Lanny Budd series than that those who liked the former volumes will probably like this rather more. Here the ubiquitous American leaps about the world in IQ4T and 1044, passing from the White House to Berchtesgaden, from London to Jerusalem, from Stockholm to Madrid. The pace is ...

... . By Gilbert Frankau. (Macdonald 12s. 6 d.) THIS is nothing less than a story of the devil inhabiting, for one of his incarnations, the body of an Englishman who is shown first as a public schoolboy and finally as a millionaire politician. Probably no one but Mr. Frankau would have dared to tackle such a theme, certainly no one but a writer of his verve, persuasiveness and experience could ...

... Elizabeth Bowen THE IMPOSSIBLE SHORE (Eyre and Spottis woode; gs. d.) is Robert Kee's second novel-- the first was A Crowd, is not Company. The first dealt with capture, and the sensation of being a prisoner of war-- to my mind it stood out head and shoulders above other excellent books on the same subject. The Impossible Shore deals with a still more searching psychological problem the ...

... Cbt Tfc ttfjuJKi: Antlion; Cookinan The Old Vic Season (New Theatre) OPINIONS have differed widely as to the merits of the opening productions of the Old Vic's new season. Mr. Hugh Hunt has been highly praised and severely taken to task for his version of Love's Labour's Lost; and Mr. Michael Benthall has been no less highly praised and no less severely taken to task for his handling of She ...

... . By Pamela Hansford Johnson. (Michael Joseph 10s. 6 d.) THIS is one of the most honest novels I have ever read. Miss Hansford Johnson does not allow herself anv of the cunning deceits of fiction, any of that odious process known in our modern cant as glamorising, any of the sudden shocks which jump out from the pages of novels like a verbal jack-in-the-box. Even though there is a violent ...