21 APRIL 1923, Page 21

No doubt Mr. Renwick knows all about the routine of

journalism. His hard-headed young Scotsman, who begins with a half-column in an Edinburgh paper and finishes near the top of a London daily, is shown in twenty-nine different positions—reporting, reviewing, interviewing and invariably bringing off a scoop. He fails to be a live character and the book a real book because it is forgotten that journalists are primarily men. Journalism has already been sentimentalized more than enough. Only in a lifeless book and one dealing with false emotions could the War be reduced to one page out of more than three hundred ; it must have affected in some way the mentality even of a prize-journals.