27 JULY 1945, Page 4

* * * * I wish this eye-rubbing business by

members of my profession.

or attributed by them to others, would stop. As a physical process ocular friction is open to many objections ; as a literary cliché it is open to more. A Manchester Guardian leader-writer, one day recently, asserted that "our friends abroad must be rubbing their eyes" when they saw Mr. Churchill forgetting about the Japanese war (they must have seen something very strange if they saw that); and more recently still " Peterborough," in the Daily Telegraph,

rubbed his own eyes when he read some reference somewhere to a scandal at the Athenaeum. Vision surely can be purged in other