The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 25

GOVERNMENT APPOINTMENTS New novels by STEPHEN WALL Keeping afloat by NEAL ASCHERSON GOMULKA: HIS POLAND AND HIS COMMUNISM by Nicholas Bethell (Longmans 50s) SOUTHWARD DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE AND PLANNING F. O. Hayes, O.B.E., A.R.I. B.A., DistT.P. BOROUGH ARCHITECT AND PLANNER Ri-advertised Previous applicants need not apply GROUP LEADER.

DEVELOPMENT PLAN. CHIROPODISTS Applications arc invited for full-time posts of Senior Chiropodists on the staff of the County Medical Officer. The Direct chiropody service ls bang further extended at Health Clinics, the location of which will be determined by negotiation with the successful applicants. Applicants roust be state registered and be. capable of providing effective advice and service to children, expectant mothers, the physically handicapped and lire elderly.

A good understanding and working relationships with colleagues in private practice in the County would be essenUal. The salary scale for the posts is 916 to 1172 per annum and certain allowances arc granted during the initial period of employment in appropriate cases. Car allowance payable and loan scheme for car purchase available. Application form can be obtained from the Comity Medical Officer Pepper House, Pepper Row, Chester, and should be returned not later than 16th Ancnst 1969. PRINCIPAL OFFICER RANGE i Anybody with a nursery scrap-screen knows what surrealistic magic can be brewed from juxtaposed cut-outs currently called 'collages').

Max Ernst used the device with scalp-crawling effect in the thirties. In 'The Beautiful from which this plate is taken, Meg Rutherford returns to the older and milder recipe of wistful mystery. Charming, fantastic and dream-provoking, this original little picture book is published by Allen and Unwin at 21s. Including London Weighting) Applications are invited for this position In the Planning Division of the Department of Architecture and Planning. The person appointed will be responsible or co-ordinating all development plan matters and for the preparation of the Local Development Plan within the strategic framework of Greater London.

The group, one of three groups in the planning division, comprises of series of teams each dealing with related aspects of planning. Southwark, with a population of approximately 300,000, has a whole range of planning problems and currently has one of the biggest housing redevelopment programmes in the Country, making this appointment a particularly interesting one. Applicants should be associates of the Town Planning Institute and have had appropriate experience. Forms are obtainabie from the Establishment Division, Town Hall, Peckham Road. London, S.E.5., Te.

703 631 1 1 Ext. 3. Closing date: 16th August, 1969. Ref; (043J7) Tiger and tiger-lily by NAOMI LEWIS Ministry of Public Building and Works 0.R. Team Members A few places in a new operational research team in London are available for people with experience, ability and aptitude in the O.R.

field. The team, consisting of six staff led by a Senior Principal Scientific Officer, is being set up to undertake studies which may embrace any of the diverse activities of the Ministry of Public Building and Works. The Ministry has a considerable building programme, including maintenance, and employs a large direcfiy-eraployed labour force in depots throughout the country. It is also responsible for making large-scale purchases and controls an extensive, stores and transport organisation. In these areas and others it Is intended to use O.R.

techniques to obtain the best value for Computer facilities are available. Candidates must be familiar with statistical and O.R. techniques. A degree in O.R, or other evidence of training and study in this field would be an advantage. Age normally 26 or over.

Starting salary would depend upon experience and qualifications but would fall within the range of 1,5902,491. An extra 125 per annum is' payable in Central London. Prospects of permanent pensionable appointment. For further details and application-forms write to Ministry of Public Building and Works, E.D.2b, Lambeth Bridge House, London, or telephone 01-735 7611, ext. 1145.

WHAT very strange marriages literary men seem to make! So, in 1885, remarked one literary wife (Mrs R. L. Stevenson) about another (Mrs Thomas Hardy). She knew, of course, that to be the spou.se of a writer of genius is not a comfortable nor an easy role, even if one is not left behind in the country like Mrs Shakespeare, or despised for having too many children and finally turned from the family home like Mrs Dickens (Elizabeth Browning, by contrast, was clever enough share or even assume the leading place.) But. comfortable or not.

it is a role, and can have uncalculated literary results. If any excuse were needed for writing The Violent Friend, it would be the light that it throws on this. Though Fanny, without her marriage to Stevenson, would probably never have rated a book, fiction would balk at the range of place and event in her personal story Born 1840 in a small Mid-Western pioneer frontier town, married to handsome. feckless Sam Osboume at 1 7, she starts as a Bret Harte character leaving for Europe at 36 to study art (and get free of the philandering Sam) she becomes a heroine out of Henry James. Moving at last from Pans to Grez with her near-adult daughter BeUc.

and son Lloyd, she first met RLS, 10 years her junior. Their paths were never to separate again All the descriptions of Fanny, from whatever hand, emphasise the beautv of her looks about this time. ecept for hei.ominLT and rather ilcf. she did no( grealfy change rhough her legs were too short for modern tastes, her face was arresting, with a clear dark-pale skin, sensual features as precise as in a cameo, and dark and piercing eyes those eyes of gold and bramble-dew in the poem) For Colvin, her 'build and character somehow suggested Napoleon A LO MATCH bv Barbara Skelton (Ross 30s) SUMMER FIRES by Lorna Pegram (MacGibbon and Kee 30s) DR AMADEUS by Edward Candy (Collancz 25s) HERE ENDETH THE LESSON by Chaim Bermant (Eyre and Spottiswoode 25s) WHEN so many novels feel obliged to pad on and out to a conventional 250 pages or so, it may seem ungrateful to complain of these new ones thai they ought to have acknowledged their limitations rather less readily. Barbara Skelton is at least able to make a calculating cursoriness seem a legitimate component of her style.

A Love Match introduces with a 1crst.L tdi-omcim a group of more oi less modish and more or less impossible characters before settling down to the marriage of Carol and Claude. There is a fashionable painter who spends as much time on a matted sheep-skin rug with any woman who comes along as before the canvas an indulgent ex-nurse left carrying Hie baby after the last of a series of dreadful men some rich bohemians who entertain a ceaseless and hungry stream of smart, maladjusted guests at their place in the Midi, the Domaine de St Migraine These and others make up a haphazard if sometimes amusing assortment When the heroine marries Claude Boursm. an indolent French writer always about to produce his book on Malraux, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. the novel lurns serious Carol, uho badly wants a child, has some operations to improve her chances of conceiving; her diN-appointment turns to despair. The genuine feeling for the panic beneath the emptiness that briefly emerges in 1 A Love Match i loo little and too lale to give the book any rea.1 coherence or weight.

The prevailing tone has been too close to a knowing and literate form of gossip to be capable even w-hen the chaff is winnowed of more than sporadic effects. Lorna Pegram shortish second novel. Summer Fires, is put together logically enough so logically, in fact, that the construction not only shows through the story but also, in a sense, shows it up. Paula, a recently widowed journalist, goes down to Suffolk to do a piece on Leo. said (but not shown i to be an important composer.

She finds a beautiful setting for a mildly strange set-up. Leo, unable to have children by his wife, Pat, lives with both her and Daphne, the mother of his two "sons. Not much experience of novels is needed to predict that Paula will disturb and expose this apparently stable menage, and that her violent love affair with Leo will force on each and all a nc awareness ol what, where and who they are. Nor will it surprise many that an accidental fire breaks out when the situation has reached burning-point The scenes between the three graces are done in a clipped but not too unconvincing way. but Paula's sparring dialogues writh Leo seem nearer to a television dramatist's notion of how people talk than to any more plausible style of exchange.

The old house itself, groaning with beams, honeysuckle, and home-made preserves, too easily recalls Howards End as visited by Ideal Home. The Dr Amadeus of Edward Candy's title is the emissary of the Sparaxis Foundation, which emanates from Diocletian, an eager young university in the west of His mission in England is to find literary talent to support. He investigates three candidates: Burden, a crumbling modernist of the heroic generation who has not published anything foT a very long time Mrs Enderby, a struggling widow with a select tit would be more proper to say simply, small) readership and Florence Milsom, a girl poet taken up and quite often laid down by Sunandra (' Sunny '1 Das, an editor the littleness of whose magazine is no guide to the enormity of his pretensions. Mr Candy has a certain amount of fun with these and associated figures. The book has most life, however, when the narrator allows his own dry, depreciatory tone to handle what rs after all pretty thin material with a modicum of nuance Here Endetb the Lesson.

Chaim Bermant's new book, isn't very substantial either, but it is quite funny quite a lot of the tune. David Garbett is a thoroughly undedicated schoolmaster suffering from antenatal depression. He now looks back on a carefree time of solvency and freedom, lost since his wife so visibly became what she now so mountainously -is. pregnant. His professional decline begins when one of most developed but least academically promising girls gives him some coaching after school, and continues with a demanding female colleague on supply.

His chances of ever achieving the responsibility allowance as head of the history department seem increasingly temote and are finally done for wf.en Ga Dett has a blind in Soho with one of his lads. Neither his GP nor a psychiatrist to whom Garbett has recourse can take him seriously, and clearly we aren't meant to, either. Mr Bermant's appeal is based on following through to the point of farce arid disaster the implications of feelings that are common enough a pleasant formula if fas here) there are enough gags to keep it going pin h-im down Is too many mind as merely a writer of schoolboy yams? Still, Miss Mackay herself observes temperately that, after years of living mentally with me Stevensons, she could wish that RLS had not let Fanny offer so much advice. 'Though he did not let her criticisms dominate his writing, they made his craft drag its anchor more or She adds the interesting suggestion, though, that Fanny's fits of mental breakdown in 1893 (a matter hitherto kept a family secret) helped to break down, in his final writing, Stevenson's unease in presenting women. Illness and she notes, were old stories to him, but they were his own, which required less imagination than those of another All the same, his letters make clear that the hesitations were about the effect on the printed page they were never in his creative mind: With all my romance, I am a realist and a prosaist, and a most fanatical lover of plain physical sensations plainly and expressly rendered hence my perils.

Note his amusing conument on Cashel Byron's by the unknown G. B. Shaw: It is horrid fun (I say. Archer, my God, what But the physical reaList was rooted in the Victorian century and he was. with his romantic streak, no Shaw.

(Besides, through illness, he was dictating every word by now to Fanny or Belle.) The worst of our he mused, is that Christianity does not recognise and hallow Sex. Well, I cannot be wiser than my How much lay in this factor of time, in both the Stevensons? Less than two generations later an almost absurdly similar drama would be taking place a brilliant young consumptive in his twenties, would be marrying another tigress tiger-lily, making much the same sunward journeys, fighting comparable mantal battles. But Lawrence's books are different. They have in them that realism, expressly and plainly rendered." Oddly, the final years of Fanny's life include some Lawrentian detail. With a lively young American journalist, Ned Field, she lived for a time in Mexico.

The tale takes yet another curious turn. A few months after Fanny's death, in. 1914, Field married her daughter Belle at 56, even she was some 20 years older than her new husband. But from all reports, even hostile ones, the marriage was wholly successful. Belle and her mother had much in common.

Witness of so much in the tale, Belle lived, incredibly, on until 1953. She was 95 when she died. Miss Mackay's neat multi-pack sentences can offer some quaint effects. (' Lush as a houri, but elegant and witty, she Mrs Sitwell slightly resembled the Mona 'The father of four daughters whom he adored, Symonds was one of the few homosexuals among Stevenson's friends, and consorted with the Swiss On Symonds, by the way, Louis observed to Colvin that to be with him was to adventure in a but 'his mind is But he book does not lessen our sympathy for the leading characters, as such clo3e views often do indeed, it provokes a reflective wish to turn-up the Stevenson texts again without delay. IT WOULD be hard to find a more recalcitrant subject for biography than Wladyslaw Gomulka.

Shy, austere, contemptuous of all personal publicity and invincibly private, Gomulka is the Roundhead of modern Polish history. Living still in a small and unremarkable fiat without luxury, Gomulka's politics are his life, as far as the outside world is concerned. We know that he smokes heavily, that he tries endearingly hard with intermittent success to control his impatience with those he considers fools, that his wife is Jewish by origin, that his son has become on his own merits and using another name vice-minister of trade. And that is about the sum of the gossip. Nicholas Bethell has avoided the temptations of anecdote and wisely followed Gomulka through his Poland and his a political biography whose scholarly detail and unceasing effort to be fair will make it a book which anybody who wishes to know about Poland today must read.

A great deal of the book is taken up by the early history of Polish Communism, the astonishing and tragic counterpoint of Marxism and patriotism which shaped his Poland and his Communism for Gomulka. The party's founders, Rosa Luxemburg, Warski. Kostrzewa and the others, bequeathed a noble but fatal tradition of internationalism which began by alienating most Poles (Rosa Luxemburg considered Polish national independence a retrograde step) and later alienated Stalin who murdered the party leadership for failing to appreciate his socialism in one The years of resistance to Nazi occupation determined the party's future attitudes Nicholas Bethell, using mostly Polish sources, carefully records the changing relationships between the party, the London Government in exile and Moscow, and presents the available evidence on the mysterious murder of Nowotko and the arrest of Pawel Finder which brought Gomulka to the head of the party during the Occupation. -f ONLY after the war did it become clear that the tragedy of the thirties and the experience of patriotic resistance had permanently changed the party. Those, who had spent the war in Moscow returned and in 1948 overthrew Gomulka as a Titoist who had dared to follow a special Polish path to socialism.

But the fallen Gomulka escaped with his life, and came back in 1956 to establish the right of Polish Communism to tackle its problems in its own way As Nicholas Bethell points out, a long misunderstanding then began. Gomulka used the liberals of 1956 to destroy bis Stalinists opponents, but was not one of them; he emerged Gradually as an authori tarian of the centre who began to link revisionism and dogmatism and attack them both simultan A policv of balance led gradually to a repressive suspicion of change the political earthquake of 1968 in Poland revealed the impatience with his austere regime which had infected party and society. With the wild anti Zionist hysteria and Polish troops invading Czechoslovakia in breach ot Gomulka own ideas of Com munist sovereignty, the Gomulka era in effect came to its end. Saddened by the debacle of 1968, Bethell is perhaps too pessimistic about Gomulka ideas on foreign policy when he writes that his plan is to keep West. Germany and Russia at daggers drawn.

Confrontation in Europe puts Poland per manentlv at the mercv of one or the other; Gomulka's periodic attempts to end confrontation by various security are. genuine as his deep suspicion of Bonn which often frustrates his own efforts. His speech this May, offering Bonn easier terms lor. a relationship and differentiating; be tween 'goqd-'-and 'bad forces in West Germany, was an' example. Immobility 'ih a moving Europe can only increase GomuIkas personal dependence on-Soviet support the position he has always areaaeo.

cock bird furiously attacking stuffed kingfisher all this is a saga in itself. The amiable nestlings are pitch forked into life, learning selfishness and aggression the hard way when the parents expel them, and many young birds get waterlogged and drown in the main river before they discover the ditches and earners. Hand-rearing one abandoned "brood had its problems. When, abathtul of bullheads was providedto them they obstiiia.tely 'surveyed' the ceiling, except one which waded in under the impression that if was a heron. In -desperation the Eastmans repeatedly showed them the film of the parents fishing, which seemed to work, and they had the eventual satisfaction of launching the family on the world with reasonable chance of survival.

Christopher Wordsworth COUNTY BOROUGH OF WALSALL CHILDREN DEPARTMENT Applications are invited from Qualified and experienced Officers for ilie post of SENIOR CHILD CARE OFFICER be responsible for TRAINING and ADOPTION work. Salary Scale 171S-1925. commencing salary according to qualifications. This post offers opportunities for an nicer of initiative and imagination, with skills in oiganisation and manaae-menc. to take an active part in the forward planning and the development of the Child Care Services in this area.

The appointment is ubject to the successful candidate passing a medical examination. Further particulars and application forms for tills appointment may obtained from Tbc Children Officer, Hatherton House, Lower Forster Street, Walsall, Staffs. Natural Environment Research Council NATURE CONSERVANCY Scientific Officers Experimental Officers "THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT RE SEARCH COUNCIL has. vacancies in the SCIENTIFIC OFFICER AND EXPERIMENT AJL? OFFICER in the Research and Conservation Drancnes ot tnc Nature Conservancy stations! throughout Britain. RESEARCH POSTS AND PROJECTS Scientific Officers Senior Scientific Officers 1.

Mertewood Research Station, Gi over-soDda, JLaaci. tor a new Unit to develop mathematical tncdeU of ecological systems. 3. Coastal Ecology Research Statlotw Colne, Norwich. To develop a programme qf research on the nutrition and Ecncral ecological relation ol invertebrate populations in tidal litter 3.

Based at the Rowert Research Institute. Bucksburo, Aberdeen. To work on thr nutrition of red deer. Experimental Officers Experimental Officers Coastal Ecology Research Stathm. Coiner.

Norwich (3 -posts)! 4. Ecological studies on the vegetation of hinsle beaches and salt marshes. 5. jjenctic and ecological studies of coastal sand dune and salt marsh plant species. S.

Studies on structure and dynamics of coastal plant populations. 7. Edinburgh. Research on problems of vcgetatlonal succession -and grazing influences related to habitat development and management. 8.

Bangor. Pedological studies of areas of ecological importance, particularly of uplands of North Wales. CONSERVATION POSTS Assistant Experimental Officers Experimental Officers Toe following posts for ASSISTANT REGIONAL. OFFICERS for Conservation duties are other posia may arise later in the year 9. Yorkshire.

10. Burgess Hill. Sussex. With primary responsibility for Surrey. 11.

Monks Wood Experimental Station. Huntingdon. With responsibility for Bedfordshire and Northamptonshire. 12. Perth.

With responsibility for Perthshire. Fife. Kinross-shire and Clackmannanshire. Some knowledge of geology would be an advantage Qualifications i Scientific Officer Class Vacancies i Normally a first or second class honours degree. Dip.

Tech. (or equivalent) or faigber qualification in a scientific subiect ot in graduate experience. Experimental Officer Class Vacancies General Certificate of Education (or equivalent) in five subjects, two of which should be mathematical scientific subjects at A level. At age 22 candidates are peeled to have a Pass degree. Dip.

H.N.C. Cor equivalent) in an appropriate subiect. Salary National Rates-Scientific Officer (under 29 years Il December. 1969) 1,071 1,827 Senior Scientific Officer (normally at least 26 years and under 32 years at 31st December, 1969) 2,021 Assistant Experimental Officer (IS. and under 28 at 31st- December.

1969) 683 (age 18) 1.208 (age 26)- 1.454. Experimental Officer (at least 26 and under 31 at 31st December. 1969) Initial appointment will be non-pensionable but there are prospects of a permanent and pensionable post. F5SU arrangement already existing may be ccfitinued. Application forms and further particulars of individual posts may be obtained from ESTABLISHMENTS (Scientific).

THE NATURE CONSERVANCY. 19 Belgrave Square. London S.W.I. Completed application forms to be returned by 25lb Aogost. 1969.

Please state clearly post applied far by number A QUANTITY SURVEYOR with a keen Interest In BUILDING ECONOMICS end COST PLANXIMO win, flair for ANALYSIS and RESEARCH woo nkes probing into COST PATTERNS wbo enjoya tnulti-profeaslonal teamwork tt the riant son of QUANTITY SURVSVOH tor aW MINISTRY OF HOUSING AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT Tb work of dw Ministry quantity "rveyors Includes oost study nd advfoe on all upeeti of local authority bousing ana other types of local authority buildings and works research into con patterns in connection wicii the bousing cost yardstick: research and development group teamwork on housing projects, including cost planning and the preparation of contract documents; and co-operation mib other groupa In research into new problems. There are three permanent and pensionable posts In London, to be filled at Main Grade level. The posts carry a salary scale of 2.218 to 2.899 and the starting salary may be above the minimum. The posts offer promotion prospects to senior and su perln tending grades and beyond. There Is a non -contributory pension and previous pensionable public service may be aggrcsated wiib Civil service (or pens Eon purposes.

Corporate membership of the RIGS (Quantity Surveying Division) or of the I OS by examination under the new syllabus is an essential Qualification (those applying or corporate membership will also be considered). If you are interested in filling one of these posts, write to the CIVIL SERVICE COMMISSION. 23 Savite Row. London WIX 2AA. or telephone 01-734 6010 Ext.

229 01-734 6464 Ansafone service after 5.30 for application (arm, quoting S7 13269. ClostBi date 19th Aogcu 1569. THE VIOLENT FRIEND The Story of Mrs Robert Louis Stevenson by Margaret Mackay (Dent 50s) her eyes were full of sex and mystery If you like the gulch and the canyon, you will like her' wrote Henry James to Owen Wister. (He also described her as a poor barbarous and merely instinctive She would not have cared for Certainly, her attraction for RLS never lessened or changed. There are more sensually passionate poems than the familiaT Steel-true and blade-straight The great ArtificerMade my But the essential question remains: how much did Fanny affect the course of his work? No one who tracks through the detail of this book can doubt that, without her obsessional care, he would not have lived to write perhaps the half of his novels.

Besides being the perfect listener, she readily shared every voyage, hazard and venture never mind that she hated the sea, and was ravaged by grief every time that another much-loved garden had to be left. But in the earlier years of the marriage she could write to old Mrs Stevenson If I die before Louis, my last earnest wish is that he shall publish nothing without his father's approval. I know that means little short of destruction to both of them, but there will be no one else. The field js always covered with my dead and wounded, and often I am forced to compromise, but still I make a very pood fitrht Admittedly, she had been right ever Dr JekyJ and Mr Hyde her comment had made him restart the whole thing, turning it from a crude horror tale to a semi-allegory: both good and bad residing in one man. She may even have had a point (heretical though this may seeml in her coldness over Treasure Island for does it not middle-aged American reporter with the semi-psychic Siamese cats, investigates murder in his city's lunktown, a quarter given over not, as he at first hopes, to drug-gers, but to antique dealers of all ages and sexes and every imaginable eccentricity.

One of those light, bright, ingenious whodunits from the blue-haired drawing-room school but brought up to date with injections of titillating camp. A lot of it funny and all readable. Death Cracks a Bottle by Kenneth Giles (Gollancz 25s) Garrulous and bibulous Inspector James and Sergeant Honeybody in their element investigating murder at family wine merchant's so full of spite and skulduggery that you expect to find a corpse in every cask. Told with ferocious zest that reminds me faintly of Quilp. A Plague on Both Your Causes by John Brunner (Hodder and Stoughton 25s) Introducing a new hero.

Max Curfew, a coloured Jamaican sent to inquire into death of African chief in a Rhodesian-type State on the verge of a breakaway. Lots of brutality by white police bossed by imported Boer sadist. Fast adventure story with detailed African background and relatively credible characters. Despatch of a Dove by Rhona Petrie (Gollancz 25s) Spy-thriller about quiet English literary hack peacefully translating, nipping and necking in Geneva until he is suddenly abducted and kept mildly drugged in a mountain hotel by Them. Rescue by champion ice skater Zoe and Miss Petrie's anglo-phile Arab busybody.

Nicely written but underplotted. The Contained Sleep by Archie Roy (Long 23s) Told by young physicist working on space project, suffering from retrograde amnesia after car crash on Mull. Has been brainwashed by fiend at neurological institute falls for straight young Scots woman doctor. Haphazard holiday thriller with some interesting metaphysical KM-TMI-I f-l-iLPr. -I 1CHI i METROPOLITAN POLICE OFFICE ENGINEERING DEPARTMENT Electrical and Mechanical Branch Applications are invited for the post of MAIN GRADE ENGINEER In ithe Electrical, iand Mechanical Branch of the Engineering 'Department at New Scotland Yard.

Applicants must be Chartered Engineers who, are corporate members of one. of the Engineering- Institutions. The Electrical' and' Mechanical Branch is responsible for the design', installation and maintenance of all engineering services, other than public health, Stations, Magistrates' Courts, training centres, workshops, stores, garages, married quarters and multi-storey hostels. Current expenditure on services in these fields is of the order of 1,000,000 per annum. Salary: willbe within the rahge 2,218 to 2,399, according to qualifications and (The range will be increased to 2,350 to 3,050 as from 1.1VT0).

Application forms. and. further particulars from: The Secretary, Room 733 (MGE), New Scotland Yard, Broadway, London, S.W.I. Flight of halcyons The Man On The Balcony by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahlbd (Gollancz 25s) Second case ot Inspector Martin Beck, the sad, nervous, dedicated, philosophical Swedish detective, a Scandinavian Maigret specialising, so far, in sex maniacs. Trail of the child-killer is crossed by an outbreak of mugging in Stockholm's parks which provides good character studies of a young criminal and his middle-class girl friend.

They tend to steal the piciure from the wretched little murderer, but suspense is kept up and details of police procedure are done with passionate intensity. For Crying Out Shroud by Oswell Blakiston (Hutchinson 25s) Another of his indescribable surrealist thrillers told mainly in phosphorescent dialogue with stage directions in the historic present like a film script. Featuring the balding Jim Crow, 'least talented most cowardly and laziest spy in the From HQ in the room in the British Museum reserved for readers of obscene Tibetan books he sets out in quest of the Thing which is being developed Here and There, has encounters with waxworks, mystics, necrophiles, and his old Dad, and ends catastrophically. Full of cunning obliquity and equivocation in depth, with some good new jokes. Needs careful reading.

in you don't catch schizophrenia. The Shearers by Rayner Hep-penstall (Hamish Hamilton 25sl Something new in trial stories, a macabre tour de force belonging to straight rather than crime fiction but with some elements of mystery. Eight members of a Yorkshire family seven of them the issue of an incestuous union between a shepherd and his two daughters are charged with the murders of liheir two grandmothers. Court proceedings interspersed with accused's backgrounds and snippets from the day's global news. The Cal Who Turned On and Off by Lilian Jackson Braun (Collins 2 Is) Quilleran, the battered THE FOUR genius, CITY OF LIVERPOOL CITY ARCHITECTS DEPARTMENT (1) ARCHITECTS (Group Leaders) 2,170 220 p.a.

2) QUANTITY SURVEYORS 1,45 2,335 pj. Ondjai "and oommendns talarlea will be depeodeni on experience Pull nrofe-ftonsl QUaliGcatcoiu required. General local aoveromem conditions apply, loeeiber with payment of removal, expenses in appropriate cases. Application' lorms (slate Ref. or 2) rerornable to 18th AoeDst.

1969. and further particulars trom THE CITY ARCHITECT. Blackburn Chambers. Dale Street. Liverpool.

L2 2JS, telephone 051-23C-9231. Extension 19 STANLEY HOLMES, Town Clerk. THE KINGFISHER by Rosemary Eastman (Collins 30s) MRS EASTMAN and her husband studied the common kingfisher in the valley of the Bourne and the upper Test and the result is a little gem of a book that adds considerably to our knowledge of a species whose glowing cobalt, reds and russets is an ever-rarer sight. also demonstrates what sheer application can do to offset shortage of equipment, cash and leisure how three of the most remarkable coloured plates were obtained without a specialist camera, the underwater diving sequence (establishing that the bird's eyes are closed at the moment of strike and that it does not impale its prey), the mating act and the Mervyn Jane Nigel Calders GATED CITY. 6 Francis big book Social Control of the Uses of Science 'Penetrating insight and knowledge, conveying the grave dangers of science and technology to thef uture of the Professor Sir Bernard Loveli, fi.S.

MacGibbon Kee Granada Publishing authentic genius' great book' King MacGibbon Kee Granada Publishing.