18 MARCH 1960, Page 25

My Brother Michael. By Mary Stewart. (Hodder and Stoughton, I

5s.) Mary Stewart gives each of her admirable novels an exotically handsome (if sometimes rather travel-folderish) setting. In this, by a long chalk the best of them, her pretty little schoolma'am heroine finds a handsome schoolmaster to fall in love with in the bare sun-blasted hills of Delphi. Murder, too. and treasure-trove, with a really villainous villain, a bitch of a bitch, and a flat-out fighting climax. Slightly sentimental overtones, but the Greek landscape and—much more subtle—the Greek character are splendidly done, in a long, charmingly written, highly evocative, imperative piece of required reading for an Hellenic cruise.