... 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 ...

... GOOD NIGHT. SWEET PRINCE. By Gene Fowler. Hammond and Hammond 21s.) Lengthy, detailed biography of John Barrymore, told almost in the form of a novel. ...

... . -An extension of the macabre short story, Christ in Concrete, made by an American director in England, with an international cast, and deliberately designed as an international picture. The film's great quality is the stirring performance of Lea Padovani as an immigrant wife in an Italian colony in Brooklyn, but what most people will remember is the sensational climax, in which the I ...

... 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 ...

... PICASSO Through the Eyes of His Friend Jaime Sabartes Pablo Ruiz Picasso, born at Malaga in 1881, the son of Basque parents, ranks with Cézanne as a supreme innovator. He has been an originator and leader of most of the new departures in painting since 1910. His art has passed through many phases. There are the lovely, if senti mental, paintings of his Blue Period of 1901-04; the Rose period ...

... 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 ...

... (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 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 ...