SHORTER NOTICES
The Little Men in My Life. Jonathan Routh. (James Barrie. 8s. 6d.) To everyone's surprise, particularly that of the author, this is an autobiography. At the age of six Mr. Routh remembered remember- ing how he went through the Suez Canal, how he looked over the boat's rails and watched " a man on stilts who was pursuing us from behind. Finally he caught up with us and it turned out to be my father. You forgot your jam,' he said, pressing a bottle into my hands. Then he was off again." This is typical of the book's surrealistic inanity. Another notable point is that only stupid people complain about their prep school or their public school—they are good clean fun if you approach them in the right spirit. It is a pity that the issues of Crania that Mr. Routh produced (one of them dealing with the subsidising of the asterisk industry) could not have been printed in an Appendix. Or his own maga- zine The Town Crier, for that matter.
When the author went to Paris in search of bohemianism (i.e., loose women, absinthe and apache dances) he couldn't find it any- where, so he came back and got married.
So it goes on, but sensibly it doesn't go on too long. The drawings are presumably the result of a new type of persecution-mania Combined with collective hysteria brought on by the old man who insisted on digging a twenty-foot hole in the Rouths' garden at Notting Hill Gate where they lived in a house with a past. . . . Funny books are usually
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