15 DECEMBER 1967, Page 18

Shorter notices

The Groucho Letters Letters from and to Groucho Marx (Michael Joseph 30s). 'I believe the emphasis on popcorn and other noise- making foods has helped to drive many people away from the movies . . . Perhaps they will take up fox hunting or glass blowing . . .' and other pens6es directed indiscriminately at an odd-ball collection of correspondents who in- variably have the courtesy to give as good as they get.

Elizabethan Narrative Verse and Thomas Dekker edited. respectively by Nigel Alexander and E, D. Pendry (Edward Arnold 42s and 50s).-Two more volumes in the Stratford-upore Avon series—beautifully. produced, well edited and glossed. No fewer than three Hero and, Leanders in the volume of verse, and it is a delight to find so much Dekker-1 sing, like the cuckoo in June, to be laughed at'—in one volume: a fine stylist and a Swiftian wit.

Slave of the Lamp: a public servant's notebook Arthur Salter (Weidenfeld and Nicolson 45s). Despite anecdotal padding and a free-associa- tion sequence of subjects, this is a modest and sagacious self-portrait. Lord Salter represents the enlightened conventional wisdom: his book is enlightened, conventional and wise.

• Israel, Miracle in the Desert Terence •Prittie (Pall Mall 45s). A useful and sympathetic sur vey of Israel's development up to the present day. Written before the June crisis, it is not uncritical of the young state's growing arro- gance and maintains that Israel should not extend its boundaries : to do so would 'end all chances of ,`a reconciliation- with the Arab

world.' • •