Shorter notices
Cartoons from the General Strike Michael. Hughes (Evelyn, Adams and Mackay 12s 6d). Stripped to the waist, a gigantic worker is about to do battle with a pygmy army of Armenian clerics, a pantomime policeman and Mr Stanley Baldwin in a peaked cap, all armed with cudgels and crucifixes. This was Pravda's engaging view of our situation in 1926, the best thing in a collection of mostly jolly, pictures of a doleful event.
Byron and Shelley John Buxton (Macmillan 50s). Mr Buxton examines the close friendship between Byron and Shelley (1816-22) in great detail, with reference to diaries, poems, hotel registers and what social tittle-tattle (a sub- stantial English community graciously lined the shores of Lake Geneva) has filtered down. tous from that happy period of the poets' lives. While the book will be of only marginal in- terest to students of their poetry, it seems a curiously dull dish to set before -the less exacting public for whom it was presumably intended.
In the Absence of the Emperor : London- Paris 1814-15 Simona Pakenham (Cresset Press 30s). A fascinating account of Paris during the Bourbon interlude of 1814: Napoleon is safe on Elba, English society flocks to Paris where Alexander of Russia, the King of Prussia and Wellington lead the rout from one glittering ball to another; cossacks roam the streets and English officers hunt in the Bois de Boulogne. But Miss Pakenham records as well the im- pressions of the ordinary English tourists who' came in their thousands in the wake of the haut monde: their complaints about the food, high prices, bad hotels and mixed reactions to such 'foreign' institutions as the gigantic brothel • in the Palais Royale.
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