... MANY Continental chefs fall for the error of assuming that straightforward English dishes are easy to make. Most of them are in principle but how many times, from home as well as foreign hands, has one had a Lancashire hot-pot that is more like an Irish stew, or vice versa Or is best classified just as stew. Lancashire hot-pot is sometimes faked by having the sliced potatoes baked ...

... I visited the fortieth Salon de l'Automobile bright and early one morning at the same time as President Auriol. I hasten to add that we did not get in each other's way. Never before have I found so much elbow- room at the Grand Palais. Have all God's chillun got cars Are there no more buyers Having spent a good part of last week-end on the high roads of la belle France, I can well believe it. ...

... D. B. Wjudham Lewis AMONG the benefits showered on civilisa tion by the internal-combustion engine a criminologist has very properly included the ease with which it enables the hard boys to get around nowadays. He might, we thought, have spared a word for the pioneers of automobilism in this branch of big business. We refer to the Bonnot gang, which terrorised Paris at the beginning of this ...

... A Dummy Comes j To Life MUCH the most interesting thing about Albert, R.N. (Odeon), is how much better a film it makes than a play. It always seems offensive to talk of a prisoner- of-war story being boring, but, on the stage, I did find the story of Albert, the dummy used by the naval officers to escape from their prison camp, almost as wooden as he looked. Perhaps it should not have been so ...

... THE Players' Theatre, now a rendezvous of hardened connoisseurs of Victoriana, is staging again its magnificent excursion into the present century, The Boy Friend. True, they are still a decent thirty years behind Drury Lane, but Sandy Wilson's parody of the tittering 'twenties is still as achingly funny as it was when first presented this April. There is a strong hope that some perspicacious ...

... t %md 1k/ THE Queen returns to. a London far fresher than the capital she left in the throes of post-Coronation dis memberment over two months ago. In the Indian summer it has achieved at times a rare beauty. One visitor, Mrs. Oscar .Hammerstein, a New Yorker, says that New York doesn't look one-half as gay as London, and she is very impressed with the colourful and imaginative way we paint ...