... .d Black Klondyke* Pioneers of the Pennsylvania Oil Too Life becomes extraordinary in a community where the fuel for the fires of hell (as one devout churchman described the Pennsylvania oil-gushers) is brought to the surface, making every second man rich and every man say to his neighbour: How does your garden flow? This happened in the south-west corner of the State of Pennsylvania in the ...

... The End of the Hood The Story of the Sinking in 1941 of the Great Battleship; War Despatches; General Grivas; Country Essays; English Craftsmanship; Siam; and this Week's Fiction H.M.S. HOOD was the greatest battleship in the world, a simple statement of fact which was made with some force by the Australian Press at a time when the Hood was visiting that country and when an American magazine ...

... BY ANTHONY COOKMAN IT IS ONLY PROPER THAT LONDON'S riverside theatre-- the Mermaid at Puddle Dock-- should choose Treasure Island for its first Christ mas show. Execution Dock was hard by Blackfriars, and the place where Silver had seen many brisk lads drying in the sun was never far from that quick double-crossing mind: otherwise indeed it would have gone hard with Squire Tre lawney's party. ...

... UY ELSPETH GRANT MR. TOMMY STEELE HAS A MOP OF fair hair, two bright blue eyes and a great number of strong white teeth which he displays in a singularly disarming and innocent smile. He is as light on his feet and as graceful in his movements as a ballet dancer-- and as direct and sure in his attack as any old vaudeville hand. He is young and fresh and unaffected, has charm and style. Unlike ...

... BY GERALD LASCELLES I HAVE OFTEN WRITTEN ABOUT Duke Ellington, usually in terms of his prowess as a composer, arranger, or band leader. Perhaps some of you are beginning to think that I harp too much on his con tribution to the contemporary, and for that matter the historical, jazz scene. But Ellington has (let's face it) shaped more than a little of the progress made in instrumental jazz over ...

... BY SIKIOL HUGH-JONES THE AMAZING THING ABOUT THE middle-class English is that even after all their long training in not showing-off, not telling tales, not being different from the other fellow and never hogging the conversation, they write such admir able autobiography; admittedly in a hushed, apologetic sort of way, with frequent reminders about the uneventfulness of it all and small gasps ...

... London Could Take It The Story of a Savage Blitz A Great Contemporary Cartoonist Hazardous Travels in Africa; Lavatory Humour; Stella Gibbons' New Novel and Other Fiction OF all the famous photographs taken during the war, all too many of them at the cost of wounding or death, one of the greatest and most memorable is the dramatic picture of St. Paul's, encircled by fire and clouds of smoke, ...

... BY ELSPETH GRANT I DON'T THINK ONE CAN ALTOGETHER blame Sir Alec Guinness for his failure to make the title rôle in Our Man In Havana pleasurably memorable. I have not read Mr. Graham Greene's novel on which Sir Carol Reed's film is based but it seems to me that the character of Mr. Wormold, allotted to Sir Alec, must have been, from the beginning, inconsistent-- not of a piece. It has been ...

... Have trumpet will excite! BY GERALD LASCELLES THERE HAS SELDOM BEEN ANYTHING about the trumpet playing of John Birks Gillespie-- otherwise known as Dizzy-- that was not exciting. Occasionally, in his earlier days, he dispensed such a welter of notes that even his staunchest supporters had to admit that he was showing off a bit! Now that a gradual taming process has taken effect, his work is ...

... BY ANTHONY COOKMAN THE CHARM OF A GOOD PANTOMIME is simplicity, the kind that adults and children alike can accept with out any sense of strain. It is this quality that Mr. Robert Nesbitt produces to perfection in his Humpty Dumpty at the Palladium. This quality is by no means easy to produce. It has nothing to do with size: Humpty Dumpty is a big-scale show, sometimes quite movingly ...

... BY SIRIOL HUGH-JONES I LIKE CATS WELL ENOUGH, especially the skinny, neatly tailored kind with long-nosed, severe faces and great big horrible voices; but cat-writing, with its obsequious ecstasies about these tyrannical darlings and their capricious little ways, often makes me feel lugubri ous and thoroughly dispirited. Even Colette herself fills me with a joyless unease when she moves into ...

... Changing London's Shopping Habits The American Who Founded Self ridges Class Behaviour in the U.S.; More Autobiography by Frank Norman and a Cosmopolitan Collection of Novels TO thousands, possibly millions, of Londoners the name of Selfridge is as familiar as the name of a street or a park, too much so for this to seem like an unsolicited testimonial. Now the biography of the man himself, ...