BOOK REVIEWS

Dominion, Volume 35, Issue 20, 18 October 1941, Page 14

BOOK REVIEWS

IN BRITAIN IN 1940

One Man’s Beliefs And Reactions “Front to Back,” by Hector Macquarrie (London: Cape. Sydney: Angus and Robertson). To anyone who has read any of the books written by American journalists in Britain the contrast afforded by reading Mr. Hector Macquarrie’s “Front to Back” will be startling. The Americans’ stories of the blitz are realistic, vital, grim; they tell of happenings as they saw them. Not so Mr. Macquarrie. He was there, but he scarcely seems to have seen it at all. He purports to give the impressions of an “ordinary Briton” during 1940, but his detachment is so great that he can scarcely be typical. Mr. Macquarrie is a New Zealander who has lived in England for many years. He is now the embodiment of traditional English thought as caricaturists like to portray it. It must have taken a great deal of courage to publish “Front to Back” because the swift course of events since the book’was begun has proved most of Mr. Macquarrie’s pet theories wrong and his loyalties misplaced. It is a wonderful record of a section of British opinion during the eayly stages of the war. The author was a Chamberlain man—all that Chamberlain did was right, and those actions which brought the erstwhile Prime Minister most criticism are glossed over most dexterously by Mr. Maequarrie.

Events are shown in the light of the sentiment of the village inn with Mr. Macquarrie doing his best to dispel the gloom by his unconquerable faith in all things British. He sees major disasters as small things sent to try us and as having no bearing upon the outcome of the war. It must be wonderful to have so few worries. What he thinks now that Britain has thrown in her lot with Russia, however, is painful to contemplate. Mr. Macquarrie’s philosophy divides people and countries so simply into good and bad, right and wrong, rich and poor, that he leaves little room to revise his decisions. Thus it must take much resolution to proclaim them boldly. Whether one aproves or deplores Mr. Macquarrie's attitude has, however, little to do with the value of his book. Undoubtedly many people have shared his views and reacted as he did to the unfolding of great events. Here is the record, unedited and unrevised in the light, of second thoughts, of what they believed and what they did in 1940 and the months before. books in .demand The Wellington City Librarian has furnished the following list of books in demand :— GENERAL. “He—j u Wartime,” by N. E. Jacob. “Hungarian Rhapsody, The Portrait of an Actress,” by B. Harding. “I Am Persuaded,” by JDuguid. FICTION. “’l’hey Went, on Together,” by R. Na I han. "Flying Wild." by C. Curzon. "Darkness at Noon," by A. Koestler.

Biographies due to appear in England in five present publishing season include Aldous Huxley's "Grey Eminence,” a speculative and philosophical study of Father Joseph, a seventeenthcentury French power-politician who was at the same time a practising mystic; Philip Guedalla’s “Mr. Churchill”; and lives of Francis Drake, bv A. E. W. Mason; of Nostradamus', by James Laver; and of Octavia Hill, by E. Moberly Bell. In “Byron in Italy" Peter Quennell will carry on the story of the poet from a previous volume.