LITERARY NOTES BOOKS AND AUTHORS

Evening Post, Volume CXXV, Issue 36, 12 February 1938, Page 26

LITERARY NOTES BOOKS AND AUTHORS

'Palestine Jewry has five Hebrew dailies and 32 other Hebrew periodicals,, and five English, one French and two German journals. "Dictatorship," writes Earl Baldwin, "is like a great beech tree—nice to look at, but nothing grows under it." An English writer claims that the ten most beautiful words in the English language are: dawn, hush, lullaby, murmuring, tranquil, mist, luminous, chimes, golden, and melody. Darwin and Marx were neither of them illuminating or creative thinkers; they were neither of them original; they were both of them inordinately lengthy, prosy, and dull.—Mr. Hilaire Belloc. "I have the feeling," said Mr. Hugh Walpole, speaking at the Glasgow Exhibition, "that books of real importance and value are being lost because so many new books are coming out on the heels of other new books that nobody has time to realise what works are being published." 1 Writing should be in the blood of Miss Viola Meynell, whose new novel is called "Kissing the Rod." She is the daughter of Wilfrid and Alice Meynell, both poets and authors. In 1929 she published a memoir of her "pencilling mama," as George Meredith called her. In private life Miss Meynell is Mrs. John Dallyn. "We hear everyone talking about this mad, bad, sad world. But might I remind you that, so far as I know, the only monosyllabic adjective which rhymes with these three rather ominous words is 'glad.' In a world like ours today, cheerfulness is, perhaps, the quality which is most to be admired."—Miss E. M. Platt, president of the Liverpool Philomathic Society. An expensive book recently published in Germany in support of anti-Semitism states solemnly that after the Jews were driven out of Palestine "a great herd of the most obstinate of them were sent to the four hundred most distant rock-islands on the west coast of Scotland. The chief of these islands is called Lewis (pronounced Levis in German); the whole group is called Hebrides. . . . One need only recollect the avarice of the Scottish, their costume similar to that of the ancient Jews, and the Scottish clan system. ..." An interesting comment by the "Journal of the American Medical Association" on Dr. A. J. Cronin's novel, "The Citadel": "The Citadel" makes interesting reading, but it is not a fair picture of medicine in either Great Britain or the United States. Medicine has its scoundrels, its commer-cially-minded practitioners, its inefficient and incompetent members. Is there any phase of human activity that does not have them? But medicine is proud of the fact that it cleans its own house and that it does its utmost to control these abuses without pressure from the outside. Its idealists are particularly proud of the fact that, unlike the cuckoo, they do not soil their own nests.