INFORMATION, PLEASE

Press, Volume LXXXIV, Issue 25537, 3 July 1948, Page 3

INFORMATION, PLEASE

PREFERENCES

Mr Henry Drummond-Wolff's BRITISH DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE (Hutchinson. 136 pp. Through Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd.) examines Britain's present economic position with a strong prepossession in favour of the priorities and preferences system of developing trade among countries of coherent interests and against the American policy of multilateral expansion and “non-discrimination,” which he thinks must, among other evil consequences, have that of making economic co-operation between East and West impossible The argument is very well developed but is open to two primary objections. The first is that Britain’s immediate difficulties are so grave that relief from the development of any conceivable preferential area—the maximum success being assumed —would come too slowly to avert great distresses threatening catastrophe. The second is that American policy is misrepresented as uncompromisingly against bilateral or group trade arrangements; it is not.

TABLES, CHAIRS . . . Mr Gordon Logie’s FURNITURE FROM MACHINES (Allen, and Unwin. 150 pp.), primarily a work for architects, domestic designers, and furni-ture-makers, can be usefully consulted by anybody who wants to furnish or refurnish house, flat, or office. Mr Logie, an architect himself, deals with the essential qualities of good furniture, basic shapes, and design to save space, before going on to the technical problems of producing furniture, of wood or metal, by machine. (One chapter is devoted to woodworking machines themselves.) In the later chapters he deals in turn with plywood, bent plywood and laminated wood, moulded plywood, bentwood, sheet steel, metal tubes, light alloys, and plastics as materials and finally with upholstery. The book is abundantly and admirably illustrated with photographs and drawings. WAR

. Written by the Wardroom Officers of H.M. Aircraft-Carrier Formidable, A FORMIDABLE COMMISSION (Seeley Service and Co. Ltd. 159 pp.) tells the story of ttys great ship’s great service from Operation Mascot, for the strike against the Tirpitz in Kgaijord, to the victory parade in Sydney. Most of it was in the Pacific, | wiiere she was Vice-Admiral Sir P. L. ; Vian’s flagship: “I could have ’wished ' for no finer,” he says in a foreword. I lhe story is told in a racy style, which ; bends to the demands of a narrative of tierce action as supply as to those i of the comedy of a gallant companionship. A fine section of photographs, lists of honours and awards, Roll of Honour, and index, with end-paper maps of the Formidable’s war-time voyages, complete the book. The profits from it will go to the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children. The authorised history of the Royal Observer Corps, FOREWARNED IS FOREARMED (William Hodge and Co. Ltd. 290 pp.), by T. E. Winslow, carries the record from the foundation of the corps early in the war of 191418 through the inter-wars period, marked by considerable organisational changes in 1935, to the Second World War, when again there were far-reaching changes in 1943-44, and the intense activity caused by the enemy’s new methods of attack, by flying bomb and rocket, and by the Invasion of Normandy. A second part takes in detail the home defence areas, Scottish, north-western, midland, western, and southern. Appendixes listing honours and awards, seaborne observers mentioned in dispatches, and officers serving at standdown many illustrations, and maps complete a methodical and very informative history. A BETTER WAY?

Mr R. W. G. Mackay, Labour M.P. for North-west Hull, insists in BRITAIN IN WONDERLAND (Gollancz. 222 pp.) that his Government’s austerity programme is not really necessary or right; and he argues this as a political and economic federationist. He does it vigorously, imaginatively, even acutely; but the shortcomings are perhaps sufficiently well characterised in one sentence—“l do not mind if Britain has an adverse balance of £600,000,000 in 1947.” COUNTRY

Fred Kitchen and Clifford Greatorex collaborate in WHAT THE COUNTRYMAN WANTS TO KNOW (Gollahcz. 243 pp.), a series pf “answers to everyday questions in natural history.” The interest and value of some of the questions and answers are less in New Zealand than in the British Isles; the book is worth buying in spite of that, as three questions may illustrate. Why do birds migrate? What is protective mimicry? Do earwigs enter the human ear? Mr H. A. Lindsay, president of the Adelaide Bush Walkers and a former bushcraft instructor in the A.I.F. and the American Army, has prepared in THE BUSHMAN’S HANDBOOK (Angus and Robertson. 158 pp.) “a practical guide for finding water, snaring game, catching fish, camping, and general bushcraft.” Much of it is as useful in New Zealand as in Australia.

The “Observer’s” comment on the Birthday Honours:

THE UNPUNCTUAL GONG The Birthday Honours raise the question of timing. Why does this country wait so long before it bestows its “gongs” on its eminent civilians? Of course, Walter de la Mare is a worthy companion -o the Companions of Honour. But was he not as honour-worthy 20 years ago? a» he is now at 75? And was not C. B. Cochran showing his most notable flair a quarter of a century ago? The selection of recipients of State awards is fullf of difficulties, and the decisions will always be disputed by somebody; on the whole it seems to be carefully and wisely done. But sometimes the honours do rather resemble compensation for oversight paid by a sleeper waking.

Harvard University has begun the serting and cataloguing of 'the huge collection of Thomas Wolfe MSS. and other materials, given to the university by William B. Wisdom of New Orleans and others. It contains crate after crate of papers, shelf after shelf of books. Manuscripts of Wolfe’s novels and plays, bushels of notes, sketches, revisions, galley proofs, letters. and so on, cover his whole career, from the days when he wrote part of a play on the back of pages taken from his mother’s boarding-house accounts, through years of teaching and wandering, abroad and at home.

Arthur Koestler, interviewed in New York, said: “Don’t underestimate your Hemingway. It is banal, but he is still the greatest living writer.”