Shorter Notices
Mon of the contents of The Statesman's Year-Book are always accord- ing to plan. It covers the world country by country, giving under each head all the details, statistical and otherwise, necessary to every serious student of international affairs. But each year there is one special section covering some wider field, or dealing with a particular international problem. This year it consists of rather more than thirty pages giving all the essential facts about the most important international organisations, from the United Nations, with all its numerous subsidiaries, to Western Union and the World Council of Churches—a most useful reference chapter. The two maps are of Indonesia, whose relevance is obvious, and the West Indies, which may call for more study in the future than in the past. It is common to think of these latter islands as mainly British. The map, with its distinctions by colour, provides a useful corrective.
The Annual Register is complementary to The Statesman's Year- Book. It is idle to imagine that the possession of the one book makes possession of the other superfluous. The latter volume does not profess to be history ; the former dots. It is in all literalness an abstract and brief chronicle of the time, compressing into the mini- mum of space an objective history of the chief events, national, foreign and international, of 1948.• The fact that Chatham House accords its beneficent an authoritative patronage to The Annual Register is sufficient guarantee that the writers will be wisely chosen and their work closely scrutinised by the editorial board. There arc no special features to call for comment in the new volume, except that religion, with adequate references to the Lambeth and Amster- dam Conferences, gets rather more attention than it has sometimes had in the past The section on Palestine is a good example of the objective handling of a singularly awkward subject. The dry observation that " The proceedings of the United Nations rather resembled a commentary on events in Palestine than an authoritative handling of the dispute " indicates no departure from that principle.
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