The Pick of Punch

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVII, Issue 23839, 14 December 1940, Page 4 (Supplement)

The Pick of Punch

r PH K pages of "The Pick of Punch" are clotted with admirably terse and funny drawings. Bub perhaps the editors did nob pick the text quite so carefully; at any rate there seems to he a slight falling-off in its standard, perhaps because one misses dear and familiar performers such as Mr. A. P. Herbert, for no one else has quite his touch in the humour of current affairs. iss E. M. Belafield is there, represented by a mother wrestling with her daughter's formless ambitions, and bv a speaker most _ longwindedly lecturing a women's meeting on the virtues of absolute silence in war-time. Mr. Anthony Armstrong, too, is topical over the sorrows of a village trying to dispose of its carefully hoarded waste paper; and Miss Virginia Graham has a nice incisive little poem on the duties of a chauffeuse to a charitable lady, eminent in some women's organisation. Among the less familiar contributors tJie palm must certainly go to Mr. Basil Boothroyd for lhe World or Music," a fascinating account of a rehearsal of the Rhythmic bugar I lums with an unfamiliar pianist. "Tho Pick of Punch," an annual selection. (Chatto and Windus.)