CIVILISATION IN DANGER.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 224, 21 September 1935, Page 2 (Supplement)

CIVILISATION IN DANGER.

EMPIRE'S WILD FLOWERS,

NOVEL BY WILL A CATHER.

All my plays are masterpieces except tho last one. Tliey always were.—Mr. Bernard Shaw.

Tho soul is a gentleman whose acquaintance most people have no desire to make.—Dean Inge.

On page one "Cyrano" reviews "Seven Pillars of Wisdom," by Lawrence of Arabia. It has been stated that Law-' rence allowed himself no share in the financial success of "Revolt in the Desert," but devoted the £15,000 he received from that source to the endowment of an educational fund for the benefit of children of officers of the Royal Air Force. During 1934 alone flle fund provided £795 toward the. education of 42 children, most of them left fatherless, A selection from Lawrence's letters, made by his brother, is to be published in book form. ' Its profits will go to purposes which it is thought their writer would himself have approved.

James Hilton remarks in the "Daily Telegraph," on tho popularity in America of a new vernacular school of fiction that disdains anything bookish, dislikes punctuation, avoids where possible words of more than one o,r two syllables, prefers compound sentences to complex, and portrays by a kind of pungent unliteraryness the moods and manners of its age. Its strong points are its virility, its candour, and that economy of words with which so many of our modern activities, from cabling to headlining, are invigorating language. Where it loses is in its tendency to make simplicity an end rather than a menus, so that tho net result is merely tiie ovcrsimple masquerading as the oversubtle.