Boows OF REFEILEACE.—The ' Daily Mail' Year Book for 1914
is as good as ever, and that is saying a great deal. It is, of course, quite small as books of reference go nowadays, but the information is all useful, up-to-date, and very often supplied by experts. As an example of the up-to-dateness we may notice a page of " Current Phrases Explained," which gives us Lord Haldane's new contribution to the language by acclimatisation—" Sittlichkeit." "The phrase may be trans- lated as national good form.'" We have also a page of "authors' pseudonyms and initial signatures." Each man will find something specially to his taste in the Year Book, but for ourselves we have read with special interest the two pages of " Changing London." The number of mammoth hotels and restaurants which are going to be built in the course of the next year is perfectly appalling. In Glasshouse Street we are to have the biggest hotel in Europe with a
thousand bedrooms. In Piccadilly there is to be a " palatial " hotel facing the Green Park, while the site of St. George's Hospital is to give us yet another huge hotel. Besides this there is to be apparently a new hotel in Oxford Street cover- ing the site of the old Princess's Theatre. Near Charing Cross houses in the Strand and Craven Street are to disappear to make room for yet another great restaurant. And yet it is always said that very few if any of the great London hotels earn a living wage for the capital sunk in them ! Building hotels would appear to be a kind of habit on the part of the capitalists.—The New Standard Dictionary of the English Language. 2 vols. (Waverley Book Co. )—This is an ex- panded edition of a work originally published twenty years ago, and will prove of great value as a practical dictionary on a large but not overwhelming scale.—We may also mention The Year-Book of the Scientific and Learned Societies of Great Britain and Ireland. (Charles Griffin. 78. 6d.)
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