... 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 ...

... The Snow Queen speaks ■1WM1B MISS MARY MCCARTHY IS A FORMIDABLE LADY who has written novels, criticism, the memoirs of her girlhood, a certain amount of coldly alarming journalism, and, most unexpectedly, a book on Venice, a city with an appeal too lush ...

... on galleries ROBERT WRAIGHT TOWARDS PLAIN SPEAKING Last April, when The Studio celebrated its 70th birthday, it published many eulogistic mes sages from leading figures of the art world. Most of these leading figures were old men and they paid tribute ...

... I Speaking as a non-Zen Buddhist Robert Wraight To tell a serious artist that his work is very tasteful is just about the most damning thing you can say these days and I shall therefore refrain from saying it about the exhibition of paintings by Luigi ...

... 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 ...

... source of inspira tion, and it will speak to you in its own language, the language of sculpture. What it says to each individual will vary and may have little resemblance to what he wants it to say, but it will speak with force to all but the mentally ...

... 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 ...

... systematic murder of the Jews in their thousands and tens of thousands. He and Father Riccardo were urging that the Pope should speak out, that he should condemn Hitler and that the papal attitude should be made plain before the world. It is a matter of history ...

... convicted embezzler, remains year after year immured in the same house with the wife he has dis graced and who will not see him or speak to him. Ibsen contrived for the tomb-like drawing-room in which the twin sisters sit exchang ing barbed memories of the past ...

... quite quickly learn to speak out. Then this too will be a memorable performance. Static, brooding, hard and, above all, matter of fact, she taps her foot to summon the spirits that tend on mortal thought from beneath the earth, speaking urgently, hus kily ...

... expected when the film's principal speaking characters are dancers namely, Kirsten Simone and Mette Honningen. It makes one wonder, though, how Nadia Nerina and Ann Jenner, both comparable artists, would respond to speaking film roles. Because Ballerina is ...

... 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 ...