The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 3

THE OBSERVES, SUNDAY, AUGUST 24, 1947 3 New Novels Profile TELLER OF TALES John Buchan. By his Wife and Friends. With a Preface by George M. Trevelyan, OM. (Hodder and Stoughton- 12s.

6d.) By THOMAS JONES, C.H. Clayton PEOPLE OF VISION Lord, I Was Afraid. By Nigel Balchin. (Collins. 12s.

6d.) This Petty Pace. A Book of Drawings. By Mary Petty. Preface by Jumes Thurber. (Paul Elek.

18s.) William Blake: Selected Poems. Introduction by Denis Saurat. (Westhouse. 12s. 6d.) The Golden Asse.

By Lucius Apuleius. With drawings by Brian Robb. Westhouse. 10s. 6d.) By ROBERT LYND the game of Happy Families is modernised as HaDtiv Com DALCWIM LORD, I WAS AFRAID Nigel Balchin is one of the few outstanding new novelists to have emerged during the war.

He has important things to say, and in this new book he has found a highly novel and supremely effective way of saying them. lis. fd. COLLINS at lunch by the late Catherine Carswell, which is one of the best things in the book. There will be more books written in years to come about this remarkable reading and writing man.

There will be learned de-hate on the merits of Montrose and "Sir Walter Scott," on Cromwell and Augustus," and there will be plebeian debate on the comparative merits of the stories. Some will vote with Dr. Trevelyan for "The Path of the others will choose "Sick Heart River as a deeply moving symbolic revelation of oncoming death, in which Sir Edward Leithen (the author himself) faced as in a mirror the last adventure among the narrow gorges and snow-clad silent spaces. Buchan's own favourite among the novels, we are told, was Witch Wood." MEMORY HOLD-THE-DOOR is, in the words oi Dr. Trevelyan, a noble autobiography," and there was a natural apprehension when a sequel was announced.

There need not have been. This supplementary volume, in which Lady Tweedsmuir makes a notable contribution to our knowledge of her husband, is a model of controlled affection, perfect taste, and high literary skill. Her own lively sense of human character, her love of what is beautiful in art and nature the light of skies and the colour oi flowers and the song of birds brighten all her memories of home and holiday, and provide a setting in which her husband's life and work are most understand ingly interpreted. The Buchans were rich in friends, and we are introduced not merely to their names but to themselves, many distinguished and in the public eye, others adorning domestic scenes as chauffeur or cook. The fullest and finest study is of F.

S. Oliver, a Border aristocrat, who was in trade in a West-End emporium, but there are also snapshots of T. E. Lawrence, Noel Skelton, and minor figures. Nor should Spider be forgotten, a blend of Sealyham and Wire-hair, who registered love, boredom, and disappointment with the skill of a film star.

I was disappointed not to And him among the notabilities in the index. In addition to Lady Tweeds-muir's major contribution there are admirable essays by friends ranging from Charles Dick who writes of Glasgow college days from a Shetland manse, Walter Elliot of Scotland and Whitehall, A. L. Rowse of Oxford, Leonard Brockington of Canada ending with a son's tribute to his father by Alastair Buchan. Interspersed with these studies by familiars is a remarkable impression of a single meeting with John Buchan MR- NIGEL BALCHIN'S The Small Back Room and Mine Own Executioner were among the most original novels of recent years.

Here we had fiction that was a criticism of contemporary life, written by a story-teller with a gift for portraying characters and for bringing his narrative to a crescendo of excitement equal to anything in sensational literature. In Lohd, I Was Afraid. Mr. Balchin again presents us with a criticism of contemporary life. His title is borrowed from the parable of the man who buried his talent, and to Mr.

Balchin this man appears to be a symbol of the generation that grew to manhood and womanhood between the wars and passed through and survived the second of them. I cannot speak with confidence of the meaning of the book in detail, for to me much of it is obscure. It is written in the form not of a novel but of a play, or rather of a sequence of dramatic scenes, some of them as hard to make head or tail of as scenes in a dream. How fantastic the method followed by Mr. Balchin is at times may be exemplified by the opening of a scene in a large departmental store of the present day.

Lift Girl chanting): Going up. Going down. Going sideways. Going some. Going to pot.

Going to try it Going to sleep Similarly staged in the world of fantasy is the epilogue in which we see Methuselah sitting on the top of Mount Ararat, stroking the head of a baby brontosaurus and advising the characters of the story to save themselves by swimming to the Ark, which is visible on the rising flood. As the water rises to drown them, the last words we hear from any of them in self-defence are: Lord, I was afraid, and went and hid Thy talent in the earth: lo. there Thou hast that is Thine. Unused, unincreased, unvalued: unenjoyed; unlost, undirtied, untarnished, undebased; for what it's worth. For what it's worth There are seven principal char acters in the play, who are lifelike chiefly in their points of view and predicaments.

Love, marriage, dictatorship, faith, war. patriotism are among the contents ot Mr. Balchin kaleidoscope which he shakes at the end of each scene to produce a new and often puzzling pattern. Some of the scenes are excellent in themselves the scene in which the British and Americans look at each other through the bars of a zoo, the scene in a shelter during an air raid, and the scene in the post-war department store where the dice on sale are standard dice wmcn ensure that each and every player shall throw a four on each and every occasion," and where Many Views Of Greece Hellenic Travel. By W.

A. Wigram. (Faber 15s.) Greek Art. By Jacqueline Chittenden and Charles Seltman. (Faber.

30s.) Byzantine Legacy. By Cecil Stewart. (Allen and Unwin. 25s.) Heritage of Byzantium. By Marcu Beza.

8s. 6d.) By IVOR BROWN Pictures From Italy Journey into a Picture. Stoughton. 12s. 6d.) By Empty Balcony.

By Piero Saporiti. Dalliance Hidden Faces. Bv Salvador Dali. Nicholson and Watson. 10s.

Bd.) aeoraia Bov Bv Ersktne Cald well. Falcon. 6s.) Fliti wonders Whv. Bv Johan Fabrtcius. lHenemann.

8s. 6d.) uanav Mart, bv Hamilton Ellis. Gollancz. 12s. 6d.) Afrs.

Mike. Bv Benedict and Nancy Freedman. (Hamish Hamilton. 10s. 6d.) By LIONEL HALE TF some anti-surrealist painter had breathed a orayer.

Oh. that mine enemy would write a book! Mr. Dali could not have satisfied him more than with this Hidden Faces. It is his first novel: I fancy it may be his last, since suspect that he has not in him the sheer, feminine staying- power of his peer and predecessor, Elinor Glyn. It would not do to lineer too lona on this (What is the polite word? would gabble doV) this gabble about love, French counts, American virgins, and femmes both in-comprises and uncomprehensible, against the background of the ranee of the last ten years.

And it -would be almost imriossible to analyse its theory of Love, which appears to me (quiet old object that I am) to be less like a per manent contribution to a fascin ating theme than an appeal to excitable eunuchs. The style. moreover, is of the bogus-baroque. plus a conscientious modernity of frankness about the body. It is too bad to have The Mysteries of Udolpho and find that the mysteries are without corresponding reticences.

I can stand sinister old servants in the old-fashioned style; but when we get a sentence like this in description of them The foaming saliva that thickened like a yellowish-white paste at the corners of her lips hallucinated him like drops of an aphrodisiac and deadly pus then I have a dim feeling that we are getting the worst of two worlds Dali's translator (from the French), Mr. Haakon Chevalier, has tried, it seems, to ease matters for us by taming 41 the lush jungle of his prose." He also comments on the relation of Dali's paintings to his writings. The mind working behind the brush in the light of an integral cosmogony full of fetishistic objects, such as fried eggs slithering down bannisters, dripping telephones and kidneys," is the same as the mind behind the book. No doubt. Foolery in print is perhaps more detectable than foolery in paint: but the author and painter are of necessity the same fool.

Coxcombs may fling pots of paint in the face of the public I answer your riposte before you make it by saying that time will prove Dali as wrong as it proved Whistler right but coxcombs must not throw inkwells. I have dallied too long with Dali, and must abridge his betters. Two authors deal with the faintly-remembered, not-again-to-be-discovered country of childhood. Mr. Caldwell, to be sure, uses his boy in Georgia only as an eye-witness of the deeds, and particularly the misdeeds, of his slatternly family: these sketches have some of the pungency of "Tobacco Road," but are of only medium-to-mild strength.

Mr. Fabricius is much closer to boyhood, and his Flip is the theme rather than the narrator: a nice, normal boy, in Holland. It is most accurate portraiture, with a pleasantly unforced smile, and no one could resist My Young Dutch. Dandy Hart is a brisk, scat tered account of the coming of the railroads to England. Its slackness of design is such that you can see the reason for the novel starting train v.

stagecoach but no particular reason for its stopping at any particular moment except the author's fatigue: which I shared- Mas. Mike gives us the Canadian North-West in the first decade of this century, wolves, beavers, Indians, snow, Mounties. It is a judicious mixture of fact and fancy, and contrives to be lively while remaining I speak as one of those trusting South-Easterners) true to life. Macdonalds have just issued at 10s. 6d.

a new illustrated edition fil R. W. Thompson's purposeful book of South American travel, Voice from the Wilderness. Letters to Caution SIR. Your article, Caution That Kills," tempts me to give up a self-inflicted silence and fear of being suspected of self-advertising.

As the creator of the European Customs Union movement, as the Delegate General (a French title) for life of its (technically still surviving) international organisation, headed, until his death, by Briand and since by Harriot, I cannot merely agree with most of the statements of Student of Europe," but supplement them on the strength of the whole documentary evidence in my possession and so far practically unknown in this, now my country. This movement launched its first Appeal to all Europeans on March 12, 1924. It had subsequently 19 national organisations and an international one under Briand's Presidency. It meant not only the abolition of customs barriers within Europe, but systematic unification of currency, transport systems, and facilities of movement. Sir Austen Chamberlain, while he was Foreign Secretary, supported this whole attempt.

For Stresemann and Briand it had been, from the beginning, the basis of their whole policy of co-operation. Washington, where I found President Hoover and Secretary of State Stimson entirely in sympathy with our efforts, was prepared in 1929 already for a fair deal with a united Europe. Only within such a well-nigh self-supporting Grand Sphere can the wealth and welfare of Europe be re-established, Germany be prevented from becoming a plague-spot, and the consumer be made to benefit from the inexhaustible Sotential wealth which science as made available for our generation. Your article is a timely warning against our missing this probably the last opportunity Yours, N.3. Edgar Stern-Rubarth.

Mr. Churchill Sir, Your leading article on Mr. Churchill's broadcast expresses precisely the political dilemma in which many liberal-minded people find themselves. At the time of the 1945 election I was in the occupation army in Germany. 1 did not decide how I should cast my vote until the latt possible moment.

No sign of any real policy had appeared from the Conservative Party. On the other hand the Labour Party did offer a definite policy, and all things con- William FOR some months an urbane and elderly Southerner with a Texan cadence in his speech has been shuttling between Washington, London, Paris, and Geneva. At No. 10 Downing-street he was closeted with Mr. Attlee, Mr.

Bevln, Dr. Dalton. and Sir Stafford Cripps. Subject: prospective American aid to Europe. In Paris he conferred weightily for a couple of days with two U.S.

Ambassadors Mr. Douglas and Mr. CarTery. Subject: the looming economic crisis. In Geneva, head-it tiie S.

delegation to the ln-te-nntiona! trade talks, he has hi'ci ardent in the hewing and veiling of a draft charter which at expanding world economy a general reduction of tariffs a other trade barriers. U.S. Under-Secretarv of State Economic Affairs and Mr. envoy to dollar-drained ope, William Lockhart Clayton 'Will Clayton for short) finds most Western doors thrown open in pieeting and planes warming up 'on a score of airfields to take him ar where. He is an American of i- photogenic sort six-foot-three, eyes; grey hair, efficiently i smiles.

He is polite, pi! lent, courteous. But an im-p irtant qualifying factor he has noticeable chin which, even in if iwse. is well forward. The gen-t al effect one of pleasant, pugn.icity. A former Houston (Texas) cot- trn factor i ho began to build his I majo'- lortune during the first Wui'rf War.

and buttressed 't mdly before the second. Wii i is one of the wealthiest i en tne world He has much 1 Fortunes, however, are not on ciiarm alone What niiist have, to use his own i de. is an e3'e for the "line of p. nomic transit." and the grit to 1 1 'ILL CLAYTON a born in, 1381). son of a railroad con-1 ltalor.

on a farm near Family circumstances ere lowly Will ended his formal by the age of 14. drove I a tradesman's van in Jackson. 1 Tennessee, took up shorthand and 1 hicime at 15 a law court steno-: a job that richly schooled rr. the Human Comedy. Extra were earned by note-, l.ik-iig and typing letters at the lixal hotel for visiting business-! rui one of whom, a St.

Louis broser, was so struck by boy's keenness that he hired n. as Ins private secretary. a few months. Will Clay- lun. hot on the line of economic uantit, was in New York.

His job i wns humble and secretarial still. I i he was learning the cotton trade and living in a French boarding house to teach himself French. His father had died. Whatever rinllars rnulri hp srranpd together were sent home to his mother. He kept off tobacco, swearing, and liquor The ground plan of his life i might have been laid down by Samuel Smiles.

At 22 he married I Susan Vaughan from Kentucky "IN 1904 the cotton firm which Uad employed him showed ol tailing. With two mem- bt-rs of his wife's family, he fuirnded the house of Anderson, and with head-. quarters first at Oklahoma, later at Houston. Initial capital was 1' 'lOu dollars. Will Clayton's attention to the line of economic transit never wavered.

And he prospered gigantically The business is now said to be worth 14.000,000 dollars, une of the biggest of its kind the world has seen. Since holding pub-1 office at Washington its founder has had no active operating in-teiest the firm, but he, his wife and children own 40 per cent, of the stock To his family he is highly derated When his four daughters were girls he used to drive them to school every morning in an old-fashioned car with right-hand crive. Before the school porch, he wnuid hop out of the driving seat ir.d run round to open the door 3s D.mct: I'ousl as anv iveripd At the head of a familv LONDON HOTELS KENSINGTON PALAOE MANSIONS H-if1 dr Vre-Rdns W8 Wes B121. Single or Lb: Rm- with Private Barns. Frvle.

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JLMne Boole adlnst hotel Glorious sea Ai t'fl Equable climate Res manauer EXM0UTH, Nr. KNAPPE CROSS HOTEL "3 i1 ir fully designed countrv Htjsp lrr-Hced iews over tea and estuary df re'-lful luxury L.cen.-.ed f' Vac Sept Booking now for '-urr-al 'erros Exmouth "5f43 WEST VIEW HOTEL WARRIOR SQUARE ST. LEONARDS-ON-SEA August, 21 Septambar 18 -October Onwardi, 15 Daily DPEN ALL THE YEAR iion Excellent r'ept-ont HASTINGS 3 Air nf Ejrenf Food MAJESTIC HOTEL FOLKESTONE "3- i-j ifice luxunoLii tomiori orrriirriiinity includ'nj 170 rooni i ei I 'ti LiiJiroorTi orchtiui 'uf Cocktiil and inacU b' 'ptrn rerm 'or wek-endi Phofir FOLKESTONE 218i BROADSTAIRS GRAND HOTEL Well Jtoclted cell A NICHOLSON HOTEL CLIFTON VIULE NORFOLK HOTEL and Ftedvcoratmd I A and ttltphon A NICHOLSON HOTEL munities. But the book as a whole seems to be written according to the rules or rulelessness of one of those Isms which keep people UKe myself in a recurrent state oi bewilderment. I hope that, for our sakes, Mr.

Bakchm will return to the straightforward ex- pertness eft his previous work. How lucid in comparison is the criticism of life in the drawings of that brilliant New Yorker artist, Miss Mary Petty. Here- is satire on the contemporary scene so good that one hesitates to blame tne publisher for bracketing the artist with Daumier and Hogarth or a critic for setting her in the company of Beardsley and Beer- ooam. uver-enxnusiasiic perhaps, but This Petty Pace invites over enthusiasm. Especially delightful is the drawing of the complacent old gentlemen, lolling alter ainner, in wmcn one oi tnem says to the other "After all, Roderick, I figure we're put here on earth for some very good reason." In his introduction to William Blake: Selected Poems, Professor Saurat maintains that Blake is the greatest English poet since Milton.

He also maintains that the short poems are so far from being Blake's highest achievement that they are really only his exercises before he reaches his full strength." At the same time he admits that Blake often raved and ranted," and his anthology is an attempt to choose those passages in which he wins through and to isolate them from the deleterious rubbish." I do not agree with Professor Saurat, since I believe that Words worth was a greater poet than Blake, and that the purest poetry of Blake is concentrated his short poems. At the same time. rroiessor Ssaurat has made an impressively interesting statement of his own view of Blake, and to study the preferences of so fine and humane a scholar is always a pleasure. I wonder whether, when Professor Saurat introduced the new edition of The Golden Asse. he knew that the story of Cupid and Psyche was to be omitted.

This surely is the precious part of the book which has kept it alive among the minor classics. If a choice had to be made between losing this story and losing the rest of the book, most readers, I am sure, would vote for sacrificing the rest of the book, enjoyable thoush Darts of it are in Adlington's sixteenth- century nrose. I cannot believe that Pater would have devoted a chapter to The Golden Asse in Marius the Epicurean if he had known it only in an edition from which Cupid and Psyche was missing. Mary Bosanquet. Hodder and (Gollancz.

Is. 6c.l mecum for the tourist to Italy whom the author's informed and sympathetic Guidance will helD to use his eyes and discover the meaning of the puorama before mm. It is unfortunate for Signor Saporiti's book, written in 1945, that it has been published after so long a delay. The period from Mussolini's downfall to his death is rich in dramatic episodes, and tney are tola nere siciltuuy and effectively. But for the general reader the story has, of course, largely lost its news value, and the student of Italian affairs is familiar with the material through sources both more thorough and up-to-date.

Signor Saporiti's rather jocular treatment of the Italian armistice negotiations in 1943 is inadequate, and the chapter dealing with Mussolini's end contains statements which have long been proved inaccurate. W. G. Poisons RICHARDSON him do dotty things like whistling at concerts, giving away coins and carthorses. Psychiatrist investigates in order to humour him.

finds that dwarfs are not delusions and, after the first murder, becomes himself so deeply involved that he wakes up six months later suffering from a horrible scar, some quite skilfully portrayed amnesia, and a lot of perfectly genuine persecution. Mr. Bardin manages to keep up the excitement all the way. You can't expect a totally satisfactory explanation, but, apart from the fit of irritation which may seize you during those last few pages, I shall not expect many complaints. The rest are busy poisoning this week.

The Sleeping Sphinx (Hamish Hamilton, 8s. 6d.) is a vintage John Dickson Carr and a particularly successful example of a murder committed before the story opens maintaining suspense to the end. Doom-laden country house setting; heroine suspected of hysteria as well as murder and haunted by some genuinely macabre nightmares; coffins overturned in a locked and footprint-less crypt the atmosphere is supercharged long before the arrival of Dr. Fell, wheezing and scattering clouds of tobacco ash over the best Dickson Carr for some time. Mr.

Edmund Crispin has steadied down a bit. In Swan Song (Gollancz. 8s 6d.) his damnable don-detective, Gervase Fen, is still quirkily eccentric, but some of the members of the opera company visiting Oxford, whose bass provides the first victim, behave quite like ordinary people. Result is a satisfying and lively whodunit with one strikingly original feature that should delight connoisseurs. Last, a seventeen-year-old British bobby-soxer, country bouse class, of that rather stormy Celtic type," stops her car and commands a totally strange hiker to get in.

This agreeable daydream, with which A Fine And Private Place (Macdonald, 8s. 6d opens, is perhaps not quite what we expect from Miss Mary Fitt. It develops into a rather ragged holiday romp with some capers in a crypt and a long-delayed murder abounding in womenfolk, among them a whole squad of nieces. Will Clayton has ample exercise lor poise. His manner and speech offer no hint of the little rustic who drove a van in Jackson (Miss.) something over 50 years ago.

iNE of nis critics has said that Will Clayton speaks articulately and intelligently for capitalist conservatism. much as Henry Wallace speaks, or spoke, for capitalist liberalism. His joining the Liberty League to fight the New Deal brought a mock domestic storm. When he made it known that he had paid the League a cheque tor 5.000 dollars, promising 5,000 dollars later, his wife said, You don't really beiong with those people. I'm going to send the same amount to Franklin Roosevelt.

The total cost to the family will be 20.000 dollars!" By 1H36 his attitude had considerably changed. He had come to see that the New Deal, if not precisely on the line of economic transit, lav prettv close to it. All 'his naturally paved the way for his posts in the Administration during the war years and after. He went to Washington as a dollar a year man," unsalaried, v. ith no expenses account, and graduated from Assistant Secretary of Commerce (July.

1942) to his rjresent rank in three and a half vears TNCOMPROMISINGL1Y opposed to tariffs for high cost home industries which fear European competition, he has worked at Geneva for lower trade barriers with all the power behind that pugnacious chin of his. Some have said he believes in cartels. Nothing," he answers, is further from the truth. A cartel smells the same to me by whatever name it is known." The economic doctrine that Will Clayton does believe has a faint scent of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill. For Britons facing the tribulations of 1947 and beyond such associations are far-away: they make us think of 1847 and of all that has vanished in a century.

But Will Clayton may be hot on another line of economic transit It is mildly comforting to reflect that most of his past lines have led in the right direction. Copyright. Airborne Giidmg and Advanced Soaring. By A. Douglas.

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Its chapters include one upon the science of meteorology, which is even more important to soarers than to ordinary air-pilots; for in the words of the unexpected quotation from Gibbon with which the book begins: The winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators J. M. DEAL. MAYFAIR COURT HOTEL. On sea front, overlooking Royal Cinque Ports Golf Course.

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Tl. wtjuy U11 HARROGATE HOTELS LTD PROSPECT HOTEL Delishllully muateJ Modern Coroortablt. Phani Hirrofiti 5671 PRINCE OF WALES HOTEL Walter Elliot touches on another matter which has been and will be debated: the man of action v. the writer. Buchan was best as a writer and as an ambassadorial and historic figure, elothed in the robes of nobility, at Holyrood and Ottawa.

He may perhaps have secretly wished to be Secretary for Scotland and a Cabinet Minister, but he was hardly tough enough. Like Sir Edward Grey he was too entirely self-contained for the rough and tumble of the Parliamentary arena, and the cadences of his oratory were liturgical rather combative, John Caird rather than John Knox. It is remarkable that in this volume three contributors independently Miss Markham. Mr. Rowse and Sir Shuldham Redfern declare that they cannot remember John Buchan speaking ill of anyone.

That is rare in literary circles and unknown among successful occupants of the Front Bench. The hero of this radiant book chose for himself the rigEl abode, the Interpreter's House. man, creating a commemorative Catalogue of the 1946 R.A. Ex hibition of Greek Art, provide an admirable demonstration of the mixed origins and products of the Greek genius, as it feels its way out of the Asiatic primitive to the Minoan and Mycensean creations of Mediterranean man. Thence the glorious passage is made to pure Hellenism; after that come tne Hellenistic decline, the Byzan tine resurgence, ana at last Kl Greco, spiritual heir of Byzantium.

Here, with brief text, is that mighty progress as it was written in stone, metal, pottery and paint. Mr. Cecil Stewart has recounted, with excellent aid of the camera, pre-war journeys in the Eastern Mediterranean, which took him to the secret neart of monastic piety and courtesy in Athos, Mistra, and many another crag-set fane. He writes in a vagrant style as Dents a wanderer, saluting the art which so cunningly built the unbuttressed domes that seem to hang from heaven. The Christian Greeks did, indeed, make their architecture a piece of the sky.

For safety they often chose the beetling rocks, for style the domed castelline monastery which looks as though it would float into the clouds. Meteora is well named, indeed. To these pleasures of Aegean vagabondage Mr. Beza contributes in a small, but not less vaiuaDie, scale. His knowledge of poetry enriches his thoughts among the temoles he.

too. can see the Greek bonder as a whole, with its roots in pre-Dorian tribalism and its and later, the Byzantine domes. Allan Wineate has oublished at 21s. a distinguished edition of Oscar Wilde's The Young King and other stories The Star Child and "The Happy with illus trations cy ueorg tnrucn. Evening By ELIZABETH MELUR VM I NEVER saw the earth so still As this green place the evening manes Cold in the shadow of a hill.

I will come back before I sleev. Years hence and far away, so will My mind grow calm, like folded sheep My thoughts grow still. THE GAME GOES ON Denzil Batchelor Mr. Batchelor is not only armed with vast cricket lore and wide experience he has the gift of painting his picture in graceful and elegant sentences. Cricketers will enjoy it and those who -love not only good cricket but good prose will revel in every page." News Chronicle.

One of those cricket books which can hold their own on any bookshelf." Times Literary Supplement. ios. 6d. nei i Eyre Spottiswoode i ANGLO-f REHGH PERIODICALS 25. VILLIERS STREET, LONDON.

W.C.I FOR ALL FRENCH MAGAZINES JOURNALS REVIEWS BOOKS FREE CATALOGUE ON REQUEST SPECIAL OFFER, a sample pmrcel of back muss of illuttrated magazines 'or P.O. 76. Categories Fashion. Art, Sport, Assorted. JOIN LES LIVRES DE FRANCE Book-of-the-montri club i months' lubtcnption.

C2 7i.6d. Ready Aug. iS Wild Life in South Africa COL. J. STEVENSON-HAMILTON The unrivalled opportunities which the author enjoyed as warden of the great game preserve, Kruger National Park, of studying the habits of wild animals provide material for an enthralling book.

126 net No Peace for Archer HUGH CLEVELY Maxwell Archer returns to detection after sis years by becoming involved in a hotel murder while in a compromising situation with a girl he'd met at a party. 86 net NO ARABBAS. Wtftlzm Doughs Home The profoundly movinc pvf on contemporary prison life, which ran so luccassfiiNy fn London recently. With 17 photographs. 4c.

net GULIELMA: WIFE OF WILLIAM PENN L. V. Hodgkhn A delightful study of a woman of tn thousand," recounted through the loutnala of her friends. I 5i, nt ESCAPE TO LIVE Edward Howe, O.BJE., D.F.C. It Is a most moving account of a man's triple strutjf le for life itself to escape to surrender his own soul to a new guiding faith." Spectator.

Ss. 6d. net EARLY MORNING POISON Beton Cobb Enticing poison mystery with seven suspects the reader is led up the garden, but not unfairly." Star. 7s. 6d.

net Sampson Low Ready late October By the author of Qusen of To-morrow ELIZABETH AND PHILIP OUR HEIRESS AND HER CONSORT by LOUIS WULFF, M.V.O. An authentic and intimate study of the Royal couple. The author is the Press Association Court Correspondent. Over so half-tone illustrations. 64 pages.

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"its BOcncBXLUfti rpHERE was a time when Greece was presented to British schoolboys as an isolated miracle, as lonely as lovely: one gathered that a Nordic-looking civdisation, complete with Flaxmanesque heroes, had suddenly risen, like Aphrodite, from the wine-dark Aegean Sea. Nowadays history, we hope, knows better and can relate classical Greece to Crete and so to Egypt and the Middle East. We now realise the amount which the classical Greeks absorbed from the alien archaic cultures and also from the native barbarism which they tamed. Not only do we better link Athens with its predecessors: we see the Acropolis and all it stood for as a magnificent peak between the fruitful Nile and the domes of Byzantium. Dr.

Wigram, as many Hellenic travellers have happily learned under his guidance, is well informed and brilliantly informative. He understands the Grecian background, the horrid mountains," as, our eighteenth-century would have called them, and the myths that lingered there. The Greek miracle, as he knows, was to turn the rough villages into City-States, with a series of beliefs and cultures worth defending (Athens, of course, the leader), and to make reason sovereign among the bogies and even bestialities of the old myths and cults. Of course these elemental things lived on it is the confusion of them with the new adventures of mind that created the strange pattern of the Greek heritage, making the clouds upon its sanity, the smutches on its beauty. How long will it be before we can again follow Dr.

Wigram into its land of natural mountain and man-handled marble by ship, mule, or foot? Meanwhile we have his word, clear and fascina ting, with good photography, as a substitute for things seen. Miss Chittenden and Mr. Selt- the Editor That Kills sidered it seemed better to me to support this than to put into power a party which had only the rallying-call of No Controls." I did not vote Labour because I was tired nf Mr. Churchill, or because I was a browned-off soldier. Nor because I wanted to be spoon-fed from the cradle to the grave, or because I wanted to get something for nothing.

I wanted to see a plan for Britain's recovery and to see where we were going. I still want this. The administrative ineptitude of the present Government has been a slow but effective revelation, and as Mr. Attlee finished his recent broadcast I figuratively crossed the floor. Or rather I reached halfway.

And there, after Mr. Churchill's broadcast, I am still hesitating. I am one of those, sir, who do not wish for a return to prewar Conservative capitalism, and I am still waiting for a sign that the new Conservatism of the Industrial Charter has been adopted as party policy. Yours, etc. Catford.

Ronald Butt. "Shady Deals" Sir, As one who lived in Soho and King's Cross (two favourite areas of Spivdom) for many years. I consider your Profile of a Spiv the most accurate description of the species I have yet seen. The article does much to remove the spurious romance which has grown round the spiv in the past few months, and reveals him as the down-at-heel parasite that he is. It does not.

however, sufficiently stress the criminal aspect. Reference to shady deals is inclined to make the public forget that these deals are invariably the outcome of nothing else but crime. Ninety-nine per cent, of shady deal goods have been acquired in the first place by theft, frequently accompanied by violence, and the dealer in these goads is no less guilty than the thief. Yours, Chesham. B.

E. L. Morton. Farmhouse Bread Sir. Miss Eiluned Lewis, In her poem.

Summer Holidays." says that farmhouse bread is sweet "and that nothing has changed, nothing. All is good as before Is this a fact anywhere in England or Wales' Or is it just Yours, etc Pembroke. Ivor Hael. TOURING the war Miss Bosanquet was engaged in welfare work with the forces in Italy. Her main task which she had created for herself to suit her particular talents and predilections was to take a collection of prints of famous Italian paintings around to the Y.M.C.A.

clubs scattered all over the country, and to discuss the pictures with her audiences. While travelling up and down the peninsula and teaching, she was learning herself to see and to understand, and her experience has crystallised into this book. Miss Bosanquet deals not only with Italian art but also with Italy's landscape, history and people; she tries to explain how all these elements are related to each other and merge into an entity which reflects the spirit of the country Her book is unpretentious, but engagingly enthusiastic, an inspiration to the armchair-traveller and a pleasant uade CRIME Potent By MAURICE RATION LL the world's a mental hos-pital and all the men and women merely patients. This gloomy truth, which sages like ourselves and Freud cottoned on to long ago, has been spreading. Having infiltrated the film, where a little while ago you couldn't get a look in unless you were a lovely lady-psydhiatrist or a handsome schizophrene, it is now penetrating the already none too stable milieu of the detective story.

6oon some of those sleuths about whose sanity we have always had our doubts will not need to keep up ihe pretence any longer. Meanwhile a noteworthy advance in the direction of crazier c-rime is registered by Mr John Franklin Bardin, an American newcomer The Deadly Percheron (Gollancz, 8s. 6d.) begins with New York psychiatrist visited by young man who is being dominated by dwarfs. They make In Circuit 'T'HE sub-title of Mr. L.

E. Eeman's new book. Co-operative Healing (Muller, is the curative properties of human radiations it sums up his 24 years' study of the effects observed when persons are linked by wires in circuits designed to balance positive and negative polarities in the human bodv. No electrical charge is put into the circuit; any effects are due to the body itself. One form of circuit is found to i promote relaxation; another, tension.

Further, a healthy person Mr Eeman claims can transmit a tonic influence to a sick person; and a drug introduced into the circuit will have a characteristic influence on bodily reactions. Those are the main points Mr. Eeman's case, but there is a great deal more indeed, rather too much detail in his book. He has tried repeatedly and vainly, he says, to secure a thorough medical testing of his work. It ought to be tested; many responsible persons have testified to its therapeutic value; and it mieht well throw useful light on I that wide field of radiesthetic phenomena which a few enter-' prising doctors are beginning to explore C.

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