22 AUGUST 1947, Page 4

Mr. Neville Cardus, equally well-known as a critic of music

and a critic of cricket (say that quickly six times), is just publishing a singularly interesting autobiography. As the book has not yet appeared I can say nothing about what is inside it, but I can about what is outside. There is a dust wrapper outside it, and on the wrapper there appears in immense letters the legend

AUTO BIOG RAPHY At this I protest as an intolerable form of vivisection. I realise, of course, that the normal and proper division, AUTO-BIO- GRAPHY, would not make a good lay-out, .but to abandon that particular lay-out altogether would be better than flinging at the reader so meaningless an assemblage of letters as RAPHY. You might as well write (for the sake of a pyramidal form) HAL-FWAY- HOUSE. Of course none of this has anything to do with Mr.