ANTHOLOGIES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 943, 6 September 1957, Page 17

ANTHOLOGIES

FROM THE THIRD PROGRAMME, edited by John Morris; Nonesuch Press (through William Heinemann), N.Z. price 21/-. SPECTRUM, a‘Spectator Miscellany, edited by lan Gilmour and Iain Hamilton; Longmans, Green and Co., English price 16/-. TIME AND TIDE ANT edited by Anthony Lejeune; Andre Deutsch (through Oswald Sealy), N.Z. price 21/-. N anthology compiled from the files of a weekly journal, as two of these are, or from a radio programme, as the third is, must try first to be readable, even entertaining; an adequate reflection of all the material it’s drawn from must take second place. The editors of these three collections have recognised this, as V. S. Pritchett did when he compiled the first New Statesman miscellany some years ago. For a book meant to be enjoyed, that was a model of arrangement: only on the contents page was it sorted into subjects, Spectrum has been put together with the same studied carelessness, and reflecting the livelier Spectator of recent years it is the most enjoyable of the three. Alongside a solemn, fulsome appreciation of Sir Winston Churchill, for example, you'll find the full story of Evelyn Waugh’s celebrated encounter with Nancy Spain; and, wisely, many snippets have been included. Time and Tide Anthology is arranged more formally, which is a pity since politics comes first. The book is not as lively as Spectrum, but for all that it is full.of good things I personally have missed in the last 15 or 20 years since I read the paper regularly; and it is the only one of the three that gives a behind-the-scenes glimpse of life on a weekly paper-a feature that future anthologists might copy. Incidentally, it states the case for the first-class weekly as a paper read by comparatively few people, but the people who count. From the Third Programme also arranges itself into subjects: Imagination, Argument, Experience and Exposition. The spoken word on paper isn’t, you'll find here, so very different from the written word, except perhaps in the one piece in the book-a discussion between Bertrand Russell and Father Copleston on the existence of Godwhich wasn’t a script before it was a broadcast. There’s some solemn stuff in this collection, but sheer delight shines through in such unexpected places as the long, exciting narrative poem with which the book opens. The collection reflects 10 years of the Third. Now that it is changing under the influence of television will there, I wonder, be such richness to draw on in its second de-

cade?

F.A.

J.