LITERARY NOTES

Evening Post, Volume CV, Issue 123, 26 May 1928, Page 21

LITERARY NOTES

"The Coming- of Christ" is a new play by Mr. John Masefield, which Heinemann anonunce. Mr. Lloyd Osbourne, Stevenson's collaborator, has written a novel called "The Grierson Mystery." Those who pare to see how gracefully a really cultivated Minister of Fine Arts can turn all the subjects and anniversaries on which he has to discourse officially, should get M. Herriot's collection of speeches, "Esquisses" (Hachette). . "Bcbellen"'(Eebels), by Alfred Neumann (Deutche Verla'gs Austalt, Stuttgart), is another historical romance by the authorlof "The Devil," considered one of the best books published in Germany last year. It is the first of two volumes dealing with the Duchy of Tuscany between 1830 and 1848, with Guerra as hero. The author works out the tragedy of the unfilled revolutionary idea' that swept over Europe in 1848 down to the minutest detail. Commander Kenworthy, M.P., and Mr. George Young deal with "The Freedom of the Seas," and use President Wilson's, phrase- .for title, in a work which Hutchinson announces. Detail is necessary to make the subject clear, some of at technical, but Coin'mMider Kenworthy and Mr. Young keep fiio general reader constantly in mind. Paul King, former Commissioner of Chinese Customs, in his new book, "Weighed .in China's Balance," is forced to emphasise the harm done to tho Chinese and the foreigner by the seductive cinema films, especially those in which European women are exhibited in alluring and meretricous poses. "With tho best intentions," ho writes, "we have apparently done much I harm"; and if this "explanation" helps-the English to-understand the situation better, its rather disconcerting criticism will not have been in vain. Mrs. Charlotte Haldane, whose new book, "Motherhood and Its Enemies," has , just been published, is in private.. /~Sife- the wife of J. B. S. Haldane, the famous Cambridge don and biologist. The house in which they . live was once known as "Big Hell." That was in the eighteenth century when it was a village inn, the resort of the. wilder Cambridge undergraduates. It was just outside the jurisdiction of the university proctors, and tho students wore wont to go therfi to raise what the house was named after. There was another inn across the way known as "Little Hell." Tho eighteenth century roisterers wouldn't know "Big Hell" now, for it has been converted into a delightful country houso with lawns sloping down to the river. But it still has a room with no windows, which was once used for cock-fighting and similar sports.