OTHER RECENT BOOKS
Tins is just the book to revive a jaded but not necessarily superficial taste for history. Its fifteen short studies, derived from History To-day, have nothing in common except a certain pleasing remote- ness in time, place or atmosphere, in which the reader may properly anticipate the triumph of those elements of farce and fantasy which enliven but seldom dominate human affairs. Often he is well rewarded. There are two superb tales of large-scale imposture —one of a certain General Malet who broke out of prison in 1812, declared Napoleon to be dead in front of MoscOw and very nearly bluffed Paris into submission to a bogus republican government; the other of Gregor MacGregor, Prince of Poyais, whose super-Firbank tales of a paradise on the Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua enabled him to raise enormous loans in London and Paris and lure a stream of emigrants to destruc- tion. (He survived to enjoy his second spell of generalship in South America.) Mr. Arthur Waley sketches Chinese life under the Han dynasty and the wanderings of a Tang poet in Central Asia where on winter nights in camp red candles light the tapestries and officials not yet disgraced enjoy their wine and dancers. These studies are perhaps the best. Illustrations arc numerous and excellent, notably the Han relief of the gamblers, the Goya etchings and the Cretan
statuettes. One air photograph shows round earthworks in a sunlit Cornish field, where Tristan brought Isolde to be married.
' H. M.
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