MONOGRAM
By G. B. Stern
Miss Stern's publishers suggested that she should write a book about anything she_ liked. Not fiction, not history, not autobiography—just anything. Monogram (Chapman and Ban, 12s. 6d.) is the entertaining result. It is impossible to classify it, or even describe it. To catalogue the topics on which she discourses would give the wrong impression that this was a formless, inconsequent sort of collection of jottings. She begins like this : " A straight 'line, so I have been taught, is the shortest possible way between two given points. This book will probably prove to be the longest possible way between three given points ; objects picked up at random from' my own sitting-room ; from the rubbish, heap of a garden in the South of France ; frpm anywhere." Miss Stern is too good a writer to produce a'disorderly conglo: meration of items, and she leads us with the smoothness of inevitability from childhood reminiscences to theories about Mr. Dick's King Charles's Head, froth a discussion of the perverser forms of snobbery, such as crime snobbery (" . . . When I was lunching with Landru yesterday— ") and in- Terted intellectual snobbery (" . . . when we assert that we can read ... P. G. Wodehouse, but not, my God, The Waves, or Rasselas.".) to a discussion of Elizabethan Dedications. We are, as it were, allowed to see inside the mind and memory
of the writer, to look over her shoulder as AA enjoys herself
with pep andrnotebook. : .,-4
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