LITERARY NOTES

Evening Post, Volume CXV, Issue 71, 25 March 1933, Page 19

LITERARY NOTES

BOOKS AND AUTHORS

i- pl^'Edinburgh Almanac," published*by Oliver and Boyd, Edinburgh has ceased publication, after nearly 200.years. ■ ' • -. ;.

_ The .many. Wagner manuscripts at Bayreuth are.to be shown to tho public for the first time.this year in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of his death. ' .

Gogol's masterpiece/ ."Dead Souls," has been .dramatised and staged by the Moscow Arts Theatre, -'.■ Three years have been spent "in.preparing it."

Agatha .Christie, the-, writer of detective stories, is- accompanying her husband, Mr. M. E. Mallowan, on an expedition to Northern Irak to look for traces-of a lost civilisation believed to have flourished there some 6000 years ago. .

The London "Daily Telegraph" understands that Mr. Winston Churchill has agreed to write a history of tho English-speaking peoples' consisting of 400,000. words. Cassell and Co., Ltd., will, pay more than £20,000 for the copyright. ■

Princess Tatiana Wiasemsky, aged twelve, announces that she has decided to give up the editorship of "The Will o_' the Wisp" in order to devote attention/to her lessons.-It is an excellent example to the profession.

In the- new edition of the French Academy Dictionary,; the' Leviathan is no longer'defined as a creature, but as "the figurative description of an, enormity." Theologians have generally sought to identify the. Leviathan'with the whale or the crocodile.

"Why Sunday?" is a reasoned plea ,fora;quiet, restful Sunday by "A London'journalist," with a preface by Sir Charles Oman, K.B.E. The, author, ■#hb has had experience- of Sunday work, writes asa journalist who "sees life at', many' angles, and sees it in proportion all the better for the variety of his own experience." '

;/The? following short sentences,-made up. of English■, words in common : use,' were submitted- to the "Spectator," with an expression of'doubt whether one- In five of, the readers would get i f ul! marks if they- were given as d die[tation exercise:—"A harassed pedlar met an embarrassed' saddler near a cemetery to gauge the symmetry of a lady's: ankle. ■ This manoeuvre they performed with unparalleled, ecstasy."

L,ord Ponsonby,. in his chapter on "The Queen and the Empire", in "Queen Victoria," ends by saying of the'Queen: —She emerges triumphantly ■not: because of her power and glory, not because of any spectacular or sensational .demonstrations nor because of any intellectual eminence, but because for over 60 years she fulfilled the difficult and exacting duties of a queen with 'simple, natural, yet incomparable skill. * , ■ ■

Tho American firm of Sciibners has recognised a new field for reconnaissance by issuing a catalogue of "First Editions of Famous Adventure Stories, 1831-1922." The- term'"adventure story" must be taken as of wide extension. The books include, side by side -with-, such -Undoubted adventure stories as "Tho Dog Crusoe," "Allan Quatermain," and "Prester John," many tales of detection (the "Raffles" books and "Trent's Last Case"), of tho Tm-f (works of Nat Gould), and of mystery ("Dr. Fu Manehu")'. The earliest book in the; catalogue, is Trelawny's "Adventure's of a' Younger Son," 1831,' ".; ''-'■■