NEWS AND NOTES.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LX, Issue 18374, 14 April 1923, Page 6 (Supplement)

NEWS AND NOTES.

A new life of Browning by Frances M. Sim is to be published shortly. . *■ '. ■."

Mr. Galsworthy's play, " Loyalties," has been successfully produced in a Swedish translation in Stockholm.

A whole library of books in Gaelic is being issued by various Dublin publishers. Many of them (absit omen), are translations from the Russian.

Mr. Harold Brighouse has completed a new novel, entitled The Wrong Shadow." Incidentally, Mr. Brighouse is the director of a cotton mill.

Miss May Edginton ' and -Mr. Rudolf Besier, the authors of " Secrets," are writing a play for Sir Gerald du Maurier, as is Mr. A. A. Milne. Mr. Rudolf Besier was once editor of the Royal Magazine.

A Moscow Soviet 'weekly, says of H. G. Wells: " The chief feature of Wells as a writer and thinker is respectability. He is respectable beyond words he drives one crazy with his respectability, that most boring of all things in this most boring of worlds." ''.•',:■

Mr. Arthur Po.Vonby, the Labour M.P., who is shortly publishing a book on the English diarists, started life as a page to Queen Victoria. He was afterwards private secretary to the late Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman.

Miss Cameron Taylor, in her book on her father, Sir A. Taylor, relates an amusing example of the British habit of conferring nicknames. In the Punjab service, we are told, were three brothers named Bean. One of these,- Leonard, who was of substantial build, was known as "Broad Bean;" his. brother, John, who had lived on the Continent, and had charming manners, was called " French Bean;" and the third, Charles, who was of a melancholy and retiring temperament, and finally died, was dubbed "Has Been."

From the Morning Post: The craze for short titles seems to have abated somewhat. But a forthcoming volume of essays from the pen of Mr. Hilaire Belloc may teitfl to revive it, for his book is to receive the title of On." The list of short titles which have already been published includes: "She." "Eve" " Now," « ' Fan," " Tim," " May'," " Leo," " Kim," and "Why." There is a film story also called " You," and two or three years back an anonymous book called "Me" was published. But surely Miss Mary Rinehart broke the record with "K.

. One of the most interesting books ever written about France is "An Englishman in Paris," which gives a vivid picture of life in the French capital in the middle years of the last century. Its author was Albert Vandam, who knew Paris as few foreigners have ever known it. We are now promised a volume which should have an equal interest. It is Hhe work of the late Henry Vignaud, who was for many years Secretary of the American Embassy in Paris, and who recently died in his ninety-second year. M. Vignaud was himself of French descent and was born at New Orleans.