... 'TO take a Gaiety Girl out to supper, to I drive her home in a hansom through the summer night, to propel such a divinity in her laces and silks in a punt at Maidenhead, to take her for a drive in that modern chariot, the motor what more could life offer to a man of that time? What, indeed? But the Gaiety Men had their admirers, too. During the Circus Girl run a package was left at the ...

... : Reviewed by Trevor ^Allen IT must be a shock to an author on a U.S. lecture tour to be told by a hotel clerk that if he wants a room to show samples in, that will be two dollars extra. Here and there Godfrey Winn received other shocks which convinced him that U.S. hotels are less good, British much better, than they are sometimes painted. He met, among a nost 01 eminent people, iviargarei ...

... By C. A. Lejeune THERE is something eminently satisfying to the tidy mind in a survey of the past half-century of cinema, since it covers practically the whole field of motion-picture entertainment; the past fifty years and the first fifty years of films being, in effect, identical. Of course, it is possible to argue that films began many centuries ago in the Confucian shadow-plays, the ...

... Elizabeth Bowen Rex Warner's Men of Stones (Bodley Head 9 s.) is a poetic allegory sheathed in thriller form. The excitement of the actual story never slackens at the same time, the reader is awed, at every turn, by the truth behind it. The story itself, were it not lit by the ray of Mr. Warner's vision, might be too grim to be read for excitement purely. Thirty years ago, this tale of an ...

... OUR BOOKSHELF Half a Century of English Fiction by Rupert Croft-Cooke I WOULD like to do this in the form of a graph. And why not? With statistics, and sales charts, and Gallup polls being applied to everything else in modern life, there seems no reason why literature should escape these mis leading imbecilities. Such a graph, if it recorded the production of good novels, would rise to a peak ...

... IT is probably natural that, with the turn of the year, should come a tide of books reviewing not only the past year, but the past decades in European history and in the events in the Near East. More than half of them are focused on the recent war, and that is natural, too; and one or two go back as far as the nineteenth century. Generally H speakinc, their tone is thoughtful, as befits their ...

... Pretty Kettle of l isli EUaubvih //of- >ft ELIZABETH JENKINS'S Six Criminal Women (Sampson Low, 10s. 6d.) is a study of major characters-- six exceptional members of the sex. For, as statistics show, women in serious crime are rare. Murder, house-breaking, forgery have, even in these progressive days, very largely been left to the male practitioner. Ladies tend to confine themselves, more ...

... JncfL/z^ fVfrfn /tfiiff NOT enough people realize how much more rewarding it is to see a few films often than many films once. Third visits are admittedly the most profitable. About second scrutinies there is some of the chill of second nights in the theatre; the first enchantment dulled, they show up every shortcoming. So a second visit to Bicycle Thieves (Curzon) could not fairly be compared ...

... Cbt ll. Pantomimes Andlioiiv Cookman THE only people, so far as I have observed, who are unhappy at the pantomime are my dear colleagues. They have so many different reasons for being unhappy that if the B.B.C were to draw them into debate the result might well be something like a Shavian comedy. Some feel passionately that the thing is a ragbag of the oldest gags and should be reconstituted, ...

... THE New Year has opened With a handful of novels as promising as the spirit of January, and at least one of them far more rewarding. This is The Track of THE CAT (Gollancz. IOS. 6d.), a story so exciting in every sense of the word; so adventurous physically and spiritually, so stimulating and so gripping that bedtimes must come and go unnoticed until one has finished reading it. Briefly, the ...

... KEATS AND FANNY BRAWNE The Poet with his Head in the Clouds the Girl with her Feet Firmly Planted on the Ground John Keats remains an utterly baffling figure among our major poets-- as baffling, indeed, as Shakespeare, but in a very different way. Shakespeare emerges through his writings as more than a man, one who ran the gamut of all the emotions, robust in his enjoyment of all the ...

... . By Monica Dickens. Michael Joseph 10s. 6 d.) MISS DICKENS has defiantly used that comparatively rare and supposedly unpopular form-- the picaresque novel. Moreover, she not only takes her central character through a long series of independent episodes, but builds each one from the outside, as it were, so that the reader has to make the acquaintance of a new set of characters no less than ...