... THE LITTLE HUT (Lyric) FROM galleon to skiff. I think that the first English title for The Little Hut was better. Nancy Mitford's version of a comedy by Andr6 Roussin was to have been called Island Fling and it is nothing but a fling, a romp in which the company, abetted by producer and designer, kicks up its heels for a couple of hours and hopes that we shall enjoy the spectacle. The joke is ...

... DETECTIVE STORY By J. C. Trewin I came away from the Princes Theatre resolved, on the next occasion I committed a crime in New York, to do it about five o'clock. This would mean-- allowing for a quick arrest-- a good three or four hours of mixed fun in the local police station before appearing at the night court. I may have got it wrong; but I stake my faith on Sidney Kingsley, the American ...

... . By James Branch Cabell. by Rupert Croft- Cooke (The Bodley Head 8s. 6 d.) MR. CABELL is one of those writers who divide us sharply into pros and antis. One may, with reason, be an addict and know all the long cycle of his novels, and feel familiar with his eccentricities of speech, the liberties he takes with time and place, and his slv and chuckling humour. Or one may, with reasons that ...

... . By David Keith. (Collins Crime Club 8s. 6 d.) THIS is not a who-done-it, nor a straight thriller, nor an adventure story. It is a rather ostentatious piece of melodrama with a sprinkling of hard-boiled humour. The characters are for the most part unusually ugh customers, as one may gather from the blurb' catalogue of them-- a raddled milliner, a bestial balloon-seller, a trio of glamorous ...

... REVIEWS by C. A. LEJEUNE THE charm of The Glass Menagerie is as brittle as its title: try to grasp it too firmly, and it shatters in your hand. The play from which it was made was not universally popular when it came to London last season, although I have known people who went three or four times to see it; nor would I dare to say with any certainty, This is your picture. I myself fought ...

... HIGHLY DANGEROUS, which marks Margaret Lock- wood's return to films, is a modern spy-thriller especially written for her by Eric Ambler. The story is set in a Police State behind the Iron Curtain, where, it is believed, germ warfare is being prepared. To dis cover the truth of this, Frances Conway, a young entomo logist working in the British Biological Control Labora tories, is asked to ...

... A COUPLE of years ago Sydney Box, of the J. Arthur Rank Organisa tion, had the bright idea of making film audiences author-conscious by producing omnibus works from the short stories of famous writers starring, as the storyteller, the writer himself. His first subject and, as it eventually turned out, his only subject was Somerset Maugham. Five of his stories were chosen, and the film was to ...

... . By Alfred Hayes. Gollancz 9s.) THIS also consists of a number of stories welded together to make a novel, but unlike those of The Winnowing Years they are happening at the same time as well as in the same place, which in this case is Rome. But here, too, there is a unity about the book, an effect of completeness, which saves it from the disjoin tedness which might have been inherent in its ...

... SYLVIA AND THE GHOST. Jacques Xati (of Jour de Fete) and the enchanting little actress Odette Joyeux in a creamy, foamy wisp of a fantasy about a very young girl with a schwdrmerei for a family ghost, who falls really in love, at her first ball, with one of the ghost's impersonators. THE FURIES. Barbara Stanwyck and Walter Huston make no bone's about exposing the uglier side of a father ...

... The Lady in White L- By Noel Langley I AM prejudiced in Perla Siedle Gibson's favour and there fore not the man to write this, because in the far-off early 'thirties in South Africa she championed me-- a declaration of faith which required nearly as much moral courage as championing Galileo at the time he clashed with the flat- earthites. I first remember her when she staged Aida in the Durban ...

... SEAGULLS OVER SORRENTO (Apollo) RONALD SHINER was for so long in the R.A.F. (at the top of Whitehall) that we were inclined to forget that he could be anyone but Aircraftman Porter of Worm's Eye View. Now he has joined the Royal Navy to see the world, and in Seagulls Over Sorrento we find him on an island in the Orkneys-- don't worry about the title-- under the name of Able Seaman Badger. ...

... . By Joyce Cary. by Rupert Croft- Cooke Michael Joseph 12s. 6 d.) MR. CARY'S new novel might have been dictated on a fast journey and be intended for the entertainment of passengers on an airliner. It has an affectation of breathless speed, as though the author heard a voice telling him all the time to come along and not waste time on details. A paragraph may dispose of a couple of lives, a ...