... . 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 ...

... THE THEATRE VENUS OBSERVED. I like to talk, says someone in Christopher Fry's new verse fantasy at the St. James's, and Fry himself might say the same thing. He likes to talk, and we like to hear him, for no one in our theatre can talk better in his special vein. Certainly, in that vein. Fry's dialogue deserves the epithet exquisite used by Sir Laurence Olivier in his curtain-speech. It ...

... . By Francois Mauriac. (Eyre and Spottiswoode 10s. 6 d.) THIS book consists of two short novels, the title-piece and The Enemy (Le Mai), which have both been excellently translated by Mr. Gerard Hopkins. The first is a study of a father and son in their respective relation ships with a woman called Maria Cross. The father is a dim industrious doctor who, in his own family, rarely looks up from ...

... . By Edmund Crispin. Gollancz 9s.) AS a writer of detective novels Mr. Crispii has grown up, and, of course, sentimental as I am in this matter, I regret it. I railed against his undergraduate cleverness, but now that he writes a straightforward crime story without the sparkling digressions and slapstick repartee of his earlier books, I am sorry, as it were, that I spoke. The plot is as good ...

... Reviewed by 7 revor zAllen BRITISH publishers still lead the world in artistic book production, despite economic handicaps. I cannot praise too highly the luxury format of four volumes this month which are a joy to handle as well as read. Doris Langley Moore's The Woman in Fashion (Batsford, 25s.) is a history of styles from c.1800 to 1927, with photo graphs by Felix Fonteyn of stage, screen ...

... PROBLEMS of character and human relationship have always interested Frank Swinnerton. In The Doctor's i Wife Comes to Stay (Hutchinson, 10s. 6d.) Rex Tweed, an artist, goes to s live with his wife's parents while she s visits America and gradually discerns i the tragedy of their life together. Here, he says, trying to explain it, S you had two people who, though they were married for ...

... (btr 4*Tlie Miser' (New) AiiHumiv Cookmun MR. MILES MALI.ESON, who besides being a marvellously funny straight comedian is the notable author of The Fanatics, has turned Molière's comedy of avarice into a farce. It is a rather English affair, and the Old Vic company, at the prompting of the amused Mr. Tyrone Guthrie, play it as a romp in the midst of which, wearing brown fustian rompers, is ...

... THE CINEMA REVIEWS By C. A. Lejeune TARZAN'S MAGIC FOUNTAIN. Tarzan's Magic Fountain is described by the trade press, whose duty it is to classify these things according to their box-office value, as engaging hokum for the less-sophisticated audience and a best-seller for the kids. I don't know whether I am a kid or a less-sophisticated audience, but it went down fine with me, too, and I ...

... . By Ernest Raymond. (Cassell 12s. 6 d.) THIS is another imaginary life-story, this time of a man, a successful and idealistic publisher called Sir Theodore Allan Mourne. We see him first as an amiably pompous boy with a cruel and selfish mother, and with a garrulous old pet of a retired General as father. The General calls him Doric and spoils him, remaining himself well to the forefront of ...

... 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 ...

... Elisabeth Botven WHEN L. P. Hartley's brother-and-sister trilogy (The Shrimp and the Anemone, The Sixth Heaven, Eustace and Hilda) closed with the death of Eustace, a number of readers underwent a shock. I don't mean by shock mere surprise, of the kind which indeed is the aim of fiction. I mean something more lasting, unnerving, and under-the-skin. The fact was, that one had become identified ...

... 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 ...