14 JANUARY 1938, Page 28

THE LEAGUE AT LUNCH By Derso and Kelen

To say that a volume concerned with international conferences is based on cartoons by Derso and Kelen is to make any appreciation of it superfluous, for what Low is to people who stay at home Derso and Kelen are to people who go conferring. Their latest album (Allen and Unwin, 7s. 6d.) consists of the menus they have adorned for years past for luncheons at Geneva, Locarno, London, The Hague—anywhere where the wandering caravan halts — given by the journalists to the statesmen. Here the latter all are, Chamberlain, Briand, Stresemann, Benes, Ishii, Sir Eric Drummond, Ramsay MacDonald, Lit- vinov, posed on a monolith as sphinxes, whirling on a merry-go-round, perched on 14-inch guns (at the London Naval Conference), climbing the mountain, with Briand at their head, to view the promised land. Year by year the record is amassed, from Locarno in 1925 to the League Assembly of 1937. Anyone who is interested in statesmen's diet will find that set out, too, somewhere in among the pictures. And there is sufficient letterpress (by Ibbetson James) to make anything obscure intelligible.