... THE GIFT THAT SPEAKS by Elizabeth Bowen CHRISTMAS book buying, I find, may be fraught with last-moment indecisions. Against how many names on our shopping list may we not have, happily, scribbled Book?-- and for the time, that had seemed to be that ...

... have reacted in diametrically opposite ways. There are those who have taken deep de light in the excellence of its verse-speaking: and there are those also who have found this very excellence to be a weariness and a bore. So far as I am concerned, Mr ...

... delightful Viennese soprano, gives Sunday's r celebrity concert. On Tuesday The Conductor Speaks, in the person of Karl Rankl, former chief at Covent Garden. Speaking Personally on Monday is the wife of another conductor, Sir Hamilton Harty. Older opera-goers ...

... too often fails to reach that imposes a desolatingly mechanical effect on his whole performance. The lifelessness of his speaking explains, I think, why he seems only the pale counterfeit of the Hamlet we recognize instantly in many widely different readings ...

... is no space to speak, though I am inclined to think, with due allowance for their period, that Mr. Hesketh Pearson rather underrates them. -ORNiNG Star, Mr. J. L. Hodson's latest book (Gollancz, 12s. 6d.) is a daily newspaper. It speaks fearlessly, attacking ...

... e them as they would impersonate imaginary characters: they speak for them at certain crises in their lives. The idea is that we should hear three members of Communist committees speaking words that they are either reputed to have used or which are ...

... THEATRE BY ANTHONY COOK MAN The Old Vie to the rescue ON A WET DAY IN THE COUNTRY Sainte-Beuve, speaking for a race of passionate readers, cried, Let us read all Mine, de Sevigné It is high time, cries the Old Vic, that the Waterloo Road learned to ...

... This is only well enough as far as it will go. 'or her breathless eagerness hardly gives ler time to speak what in the part must be conveyed by speaking rather than by act ig. This is one of the specks on an other-, ise delightful production by Mr. Glen ...

... by an excellent cast, that it is the sort of picture that would probably be greeted with cries of delight by non-English-speaking audiences at foreign film festivals. A plain-clothes policeman, passing a modern block of council flats, grabs a young boy ...

... performance sat Mr. Wolfit, and I noticed that he followed Sir John's performance with particular care. Now, statistically speaking, he has gone one better than his great predecessor, for, in addi tion to Oedipus Tyrannus, he is playing Oedipus At Colonus ...

... ways of men were disturbing because, repellently as the insects resembled men, they remained, theatrically speaking, insects. Theatrically speaking, Mr. Spewack's characters are not ants at all. They are humans whimsically pretending in the spirit of a ...

... A WRITTEN-OFF PLAY COMES TO LIFE A t th e Theatre IN what, practically speaking, is still unknown Shakespeare, the Old Vic is doing fine business. The din as the Lords of York and Lancaster curse and kill, and are cursed and killed in turn, can almost ...