... Reviewed by Trevor Allen HOW many worlds we enjoy by proxy when we read autobiographies! This month I have been in Pacific waters with the Navy, in U.S. and British journalism, and in other people's kit chens with a cook! Algernon Blackwood had already lived a chameleon existence, for a youth, when he dropped into New York journalism. Son of Sir Arthur Blackwood, financial secretary to the ...

... BACKGROUND (Westminster) THE background of Warren Chetham-Strode's title is the home-and-family life that the Lomax children will lose if their parents are divorced. Apparently they have not observed an almost continuous to-and-fro bickering between their father, a barrister who cannot forget wig-and-gown even at home, and their mother, a charming woman who is tiresomely inefficient. After ...

... (Princes) The Job is the Governorship of a British colony, the Mediterranean Island of Salva, and the Boy for the Job is a Socialist politician and ex-stevedore (name of Harri- l son). He is a good, determined, single-minded Yorkshireman, but as S obstinate as they are made. When he arrives at Salva, his advisers and staff prepare for trouble, and it comes. H.E. hits the island like high ...

... . By Beverley Nichols. Evans 12s. 6 d.) IT is not easy for an English writer to keep his head when- discussing either the United States or Russia just now, and there have been a number of distorted accounts published of both countries. Mr. Nichols stands cool amid the roaring imbecilities of American religious and social life and recounts his experiences with good humour, shrewd understanding ...

... . By Agatha Christie. (Collins 8s. 6 d.) YES, it 's a vintage Christie. Yes, the mur derer's identity remains unguessable to the end. Yes, there are clues and hints which make the reader curse his own stupidity in not perceiving who was guilty. Yes, it 's all smooth and convincing and natural and yet but i is in retrospect only, perhaps, that it seems disappointing. The idea of a pre-announced ...

... by Cyril Butcher J OUR blood, which in the ordinary course of events flows along amiably enough at the normal temperature, rose to what might be fairly described, as boiling-point the other day on reading a news story in our morning paper. It was headed WARNING ON and sub-headed A HANDICAP TO HOME- WORK! At first, quite unable to believe what we saw, we were inclined to blame it on the last ...

... I (Prince of Wales) This smack-it-across revue from New York, with a mixed British and American cast, came to us on the first night in a pleasantly- complete state. For good or ill it had been j made and finished. It was a rounded technician's job (most of the book and lyrics by Jean and Walter Kerr music by Jay Gomey). We were not kept in the Prince of Wales for three hours or so while the ...

... Rook Reviews Sean Fielding THE wheels of the great whodunnit industry churn steadily on, and whilst the board of directors (who might be Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh) shows little sign of changing, there is a steady influx of new blood most of it very good. I put forward Mr. Roy Vickers as an example. He has just published Murdering Mr. Velfrage (Faber ...

... REVIEWS by C. A. LEJEUNE As modern pictures go, In a Lonely Place can be described as a small one; that is to say, it only takes an hour and a half to run; it is not particu larly spectacular in its effects, dress and sets, and should not have been very costly to make, I fancy. All the same, it is one of the best Hollywood thrillers I have seen for years; not so much on account of the story, ...

... In The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, or, in the order preferred for this country, the adventures of Mr. Toad and Ichabod, Walt Disney has brushed off a couple of literary classics in a single feature film, with out bothering to establish any connection between them other than to suggest that both Ichabod Crane and Mr. Toad are fabulous characters, and can be had in uniform bindings ...

... . By Robert Graves. (Cassell 10s. 6 d.) THIS is the story of a voyage from Lima to the Solomon Islands undertaken by General Alvaro de Mendana in 1595. It is told by his secretary, and is a precise, circumstantial day-to-day account of the voyage and the men and women who made it. This means that instead of the arbitrary rise and fall of a novelist's plotting, it keeps a level of incident such ...

... . Edited by Isabel Leighton. (Bodley Head 16s.) IF evidence were needed that the Americans were ready to smile at themselves, it would be in this rich collection of absurdities and headlines which startled them during the years between the wars. Each newspaper sensation is recalled by someone who was connected with it at the time; thus it is a neighbour of Aimée Semple MacPherson who tells her ...