... 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 ...

... 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 ...

... THERE is an epic sweep to Mr. A. Den Doolaard's novel, suitable to its epic subject. ROLL BACK THE SEA (Heinemann. 15s.) is the story of the fifteen months during which Walcheren was reclaimed from the sea. The great dykes which protected the island front the sea had been breached in 1944 by Allied planes so that the German strongpoints on it should be flooded, and the way left more open for ...

... SUAVE is the word for Mr. L. P. Hartley's style, if not for his subject-matter. THE BOAT (Putnam. 12s. 6d.) is an exceptional novel, a tragi-comedy of mariners, and most of them very good manners indeed. Certainly the manners of Timothy Casson, the elderly essayist whose saga this is, are unexceptionable, even though, for such a quiet man, he has a curiously dis ruptive effect on the remote ...

... MR. REX WARNER is a novelist of ideas, and pos sibly one of the most important that the last ten years have produced, although his output has been so small, and it has been six years now since The Aerodrome appeared. He calls his new novel a melodrama, but people with highly-coloured memories of the Lyceum are liable to be somewhat discon certed, although the cut and thrust of Mr. Warner's ...

... FOR four years during the war Mr. Sewell Stokes was Probation Officer at Bow Street Magistrate's Court, and COURT CIRCULAR (Michael Joseph. 1os. 6d.) is one of the fortunate results. The book is not merely anecdotal, as it could so easily have been, but a series of studies of the children and adults with whom Mr. Stokes came into contact at that time. He writes with sympathy and considerable ...

... IF ever a title fitted a book it is COURAGE AND FEAR (Arthur Barker. 15s.), which continues the story Rémy began in that remarkable history of the Free French underground net work which he called The Silent Company. It will be remem bered that that volume ended in 1942 with the author's escape to England with his wife and children after havins been be trayed to the Gestapo. Courage and ...

... THE GLORY OF DENMARK A Magnificent Pictorial Survey From Flensburg, on the Schleswig-Holstein frontier, to The Skaw, at Jutland's tip, from Esbjerg, on the west, to Copenhagen on the east. Denmark is a land that inspires deep devotion in its people, a longing among its exiles. It has a measure of variety, in the green verdure of the eastern shores, the forbidding dunes of the west, where the ...

... WHY is it that the adventures of a family in a French village can make so much more amusing and original reading than the adventures of the same kind of family in an English village? There are very few Cranfords, and yet, it seems, any number of Provencal or Dauphine or Ile- de-France villages from which even an unpractised writer can extract the best kind of fun and the most moving ...

... MISS MARGARET KENNEDY is sparing of her talent and has written comparatively few novels and plays, although, in the main, these have added to her reputation. It must, of course, be difficult to follow up a success as worldwide as The Constant Nymph, and perhaps the author showed wisdom in her long literary intervals that have, be tween them spread over much more than twenty years. Perhaps, too ...

... AT least four of the authors of this week's books have delved far, far into the past for the subjects and settings of their novels. Miss Mary Mitchell, for instance, has chosen the sixteenth century for her story of a dwarf, a deformed little being who ended his relatively long life as a jester at the Spanish Court, and might have been commemorated on canvas by Velasquez. Little Hugo was the ...