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Evening Star, Issue 23864, 19 April 1941, Page 4

NOTES

Having provided one of the happiest autobiographies with-his ‘ Life is Sweet, Brother,’ Mr Bernard Darwin, the golfing corrospkmdent of ‘ The Times, has prepared companionable anthology of personal preferences in prose arid verse, to be published by the Oxford University Press under the title ‘ Easy Going.’ There is nothing warlike in it. “ I have rather assumed,” writes the compiler, “ that in such times wo like ' to be transported to fields other than those of battle, beneath untroubled skies. War will never drive great literature out of the world, but great literature might drive war for a while out of the head, and I can personally testify to the merits, of Guy Mannering ’ and ‘ David Copperfield,’ punctuated by bombs in a cellar,” Reviewing a new volume of Mr Churchill’s war speeches, ‘ Into Battle,’ ‘ The Times Literary Supplement ’ finds an ; analogv that might easily be overlooked. “ From early in 1938,” it states, “ when this selection of speeches begins, Mr Churchill is heard summoning a nation of sadlv uncertain counsels to close its ranks and take post in a threatened world with the unity of an army on guard. In fundamentals he, the pre-eminent leader of England at war, is significantly at one with the English statesman who in our time has shown himself most single-minded in the cause of peace—Lord Cecil of Ch elwood, whose autobiography was reviewed in these columns a week ago. Each of them preached essentially the same doctrine, that peace depends on enlisting irresistible force on the side of justice, and that the peace-loving nation that wishes to deter aggressors can only do so by proclaiming fearlessly, and in precise terms, the limits that, on pain of war. it will not allow to be | transgressed.”