1 MARCH 1957, Page 25

The Difference to Me. By John Bryan. (Faber, 13s. 6d.)

Michael Arlen-ish heroine—though she bears a more Dornford Yates-ish name than Shelmerdene—moves through a London and Home Counties landscape seamed with racing cars, sown with bad clubs, good pubs and splendid ancestral homes, and littered with Bad Hats, dead and alive. All well observed' and even better written by first-person hero, purporting to be Canadian and certainly bearing transatlantic trade-marks of preoccupation with own clothes and other people's courtesy titles, and references to scent as perfume. Once this admirably knowing new author learns to take the upper crust a little more carelessly he'll be a knock-out.