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Radio Record, Volume IV, Issue 52, 10 July 1931, Unnumbered Page

'_ SS inte ey "The Man with the Black Patch," . by F. E. Verney, the hero, a peer with a silly-ass exterior, takes effective y\2ction in sheeting home ‘the guilt to the of the piece. Mr. Verney has a light touch, and his latest book has been recommended by the Crime Book So- . ciety. ! ® * , * MES. COMPTON MACKENZIE has _ turned author in the wake of her brilliant husband, and has written a story about Queen Christina of Sweden under the title of "The Sybil of the North." The Queen, who was clever and beautiful, received an almost masculine upbringing, assuming the reins of government at the age of 18, and being crowned, at the age of 24, with the title of "King." * * * TARDUST," by Mr. D. L. Murray, is the tale of a circus, its ups aud downs, its acrobats and horses, and riders and clowns. The romance is told, . the glamour, the squalor, the success, ' ghd the pitfalls. It is a quickly moying, vivid story of both before the curtain and behind the scenes, and the characters-the old man who, after running his circus for years, is sold up, his clever daughter who rises to stardom, the villainous Joe Nixon-all these, and more, rivet interest and will remain in the memory. * * s N "Son of Woman," Mr. Middleton Murry has written an intensely sympathetic study of the life of D. H. Lawrence. "What Lawrence was, not what he pretended to be, is of importance to maukind,’ says Mr. Murry. and it is to Lawrence’s books he has turned for the revelation. There is scarcely a glimpse throughout of the Tawrence Katherine Mansfield knew hen she wrote of him after a visit in i918: "I loved him. He was just his old merry, rich ¢elf, laughing, deseribing things, giving you pictures, full of enthusiasm and joy in a future where we all become ‘vagabonds.’" It is with Lawrence’s "thought-adventures" that Mr. Murty is concerned, and he traces the splendid, tumultuous, despairing Odyssey through the whole range of Lawrences writings, from "Lhe White Peacock" to "The Man Who Died." It is the tragedy of a-human soy! intolerably divided against itself, That Lawrence was less concerned with art than with the passionate outpourings of his self-explanation is to Mr. Murry a proof of his eminence, He was too / big for art; he was "a prophet, a psychologist, a ‘philosopher’ ; but in the end Mr. Murry finds him a prophet who failed, who betrayed and bewildered those who would have followed hin, who mingled truth and falsehood to utter confusion. It is a sorrowful book, and it is impossible to read it without a fecling of overwhelming compassion.

R. CG. S.. FORESTER’S new book, "Myo-and-Twenty" is almost too good to be true. There is a young medical student who writes popular verse and starves, then becomes a professional boxer, and meets a fairy godmother disguised as a landlady. There is &2 young masseuse who. falls in love with the poet; they marry, and all ends merrily as an old-time romance. For all its obvious sentiment, this is a charming story and a joyful oasis in much that is sad and bad and mad in recent fiction. * * x Is "Jew Suss Oppenheimer," by Dr. Curt Elwenspoek, curiosity may be satisfied anent the original of Herr Feuchtwanger’s remarkable novel. He was, according to his biographer, a2 great financier, gallant and adventurer; but he was also a great scoundrel. It is not usual to bestow the title of great financier on one whose talents were devoted to devising methods of atrociously unjust and oppressive taxation; we usually term such men extortioners. An adventurer, yes; and of the basest and most unscrupulous kind. s e = "ADVENTURES are to the adventurous." This proverb certainly finds verification in the career of Mr. A. G. Hales, veteran traveller and journalist, whose book, "Broken Trails," relates the tale of his world-wide wanderings. An adventurer born, Mr. ‘Hales preferred the open spaces, the wind and the tempest, and the bright eyes of danger to taking his ease at an inn. And in his virile ¢hronicle he relates in characteristic fashion the great lessons life has taught him, "At first," he says in one passage, "I was blinded by the glamour of war, and I liked fighting when opportunity came. But I had to be flogged by the whips of fate in the stern hand of life to estimate values. properly. Life is like that-you suffer, and you remember." An excellent book of its class. ' * * x Me. SACHEVERELE SITWELI has entered the realm of fiction in the guise of a writer of short sketches which are not nearly so highbrow as might have been anticipated. "Far from my Home" tells quite ingenuously of everyday happenings in the world at the present juncture, There is the picture of out-of-works endeavouring to make mouey by going the round of the streets in the guise of a military band; the story of an unhappy girl on a summer holiday; the last visit of a man to his light-o’-love; and other sketches, all apparently of slight import, but written with the pen of.an expert, as was to be expected when the author is a member of the undonbtedly brilliant, if exasperating, Sitwell triumvirate.