... KEPT BUSY THF. activities of B. C. Hilliam A (Flotsam) are at the moment many and varied. A scries of key board doodling recitals, with Joy Flolman as vocal aide, are being in terspersed with commercial TV, tea with Elsie and Doris Waters on BBC TV (February 13), Variety Playhouse. on February 25, and a weekly Flotsword puzzle in the News Chronicle. the first cross word puzzle in rhyme ...

... ONE cannot help feeling that in the past there has been fairly widespread ignorance about the game of cricket in Ireland-- an ignorance due to be eradicated from the mind of anyone who reads Cricket in Ireland (Kerryman, Ltd., Tralee; 15s.), by Patrick Hone, a delightful history of the game in those parts. And it is quite a long history, for the first game of which there is any record was ...

... Anthony Cookman Youthful playgoers incline to pooh-pooh the great Shaw. He was one of their parents' gods, and they dislike the reek of stale incense. It will, I should guess, be some while yet before they get round to re-discovering him for themselves. Meanwhile Misalliance at the Lyric, Hammersmith, may help them a little on the way round. It is one of the less familiar plays; it had a big ...

... says J. C. THE WIN IN the new Drury Lane musical, Plain and Fancy, they build a prefabricated barn on the stage. Earlier in the evening some animals cross behind a gauze (Sweet! said the people around me). There is also an illuminated map. Otherwise the sets are more plain than fancy. These are austere days for a designer at Old Drury, and I cannot help regretting it. Of course the ...

... Empire Costume romance in CinemaScope and Eastman Colour, with Lana Turner as a poised French lady, who instructs a Royal lout in the arts of princedom and kingship, to the chagrin of Catherine de Medici, who not unnaturally resents her husband's publicly flaunted mistress. Routine Holly wood stuff, except for a fascinating per formance of Catherine by Marisa Pavan, Pier Angeli's sister. ...

... Gaumont Well-meaning but snippety British kidnapping story, about frantic efforts of young American couple (David Knight and Julia Arnall) to find their baby, snatched from his pram in Kensington Gardens. Scotland Yard (David Farrar and Anthony Oliver) joins in the search, which shifts to the South Coast, and involves Mr. Farrar, teeth clenched, in some desperate cliff-climbing. ...

... The Black Prince and Other Stories By Shirley Ann Grau. (Heinemann 12s. 6d.) Shirley Ann Grau is one of those young American writers who have turned to the short story as a medium for sharp charac terisation, fidelity in showing life in the raw, and a fine way with words. The Black Prince, her first collection, might in its virtuosity be her tenth. These are stories of the South, peopled ...

... Tsar Without Conscience The Life of Peter the Great Travel in Brazil and in the Far East An American Journalist's Essays; Some New Novels by Women -By VERNON FANE THAT city which we now call Leningrad was once St. Petersburg, the creation and, in many ways, the memorial of Peter the Great, who designed it as the capital of his new empire. He first had the idea of building the city in 1703, ...

... Shane Leslie s Ghost Book. (Hollis and Carter 12s. 6d.) This is a book on ghosts, not an anthology of ghost stories. Its object is to collect instances of ghosts which have come under Catholic cognizance or suggest Catholic interpretations. The apparitions reported by priests, by the Catholic aristocracy in their ancient haunted houses, and from other appropriate sources, are not much less ...

... : i : By Stephen Ran- some. (Gollancz 10s. 6d.) Being a detective (Gollancz 10s. 6d.) Being a detective story, this cannot have the cleverness of its plot more than hinted at. A gentle old antique dealer in an American town has been acquitted of murder, but remains under a cloud of neighbourly suspicion. His defend ing lawyer had hidden the incriminating gun, and his unease, focused on this ...

... Anthony Cookman THE new Laurier Lister revue at the Comedy, Fresh Airs, is charmingly successful; yet, strange to say, it seems to arrive at success along a knife-edge of anxiety lest its fate should be to fail. The Management Regrets sings Mr. Max Adrian by way of introduction, that though it had been hoped to produce an unconventional revue the hope was soon seen to be vain. At this time of ...

... /COMPETITION, even in the form of mutual imitation, has indisputably achieved a stimulating effect on B.B.C. television. Many B.B.C. programmes begin badly, but under expert guidance improve steadily, whereas the newer commercial companies seem to suffer from bright ideas which fizzle out. When Caryl Doncaster produced the first This Week for Associated Rediffusion it promised to be the ...