Mr. Causton and Mr. Young have done a useful service
in having collected together a body of information, which is otherwise only obtainable with great difficulty, regarding the operation of the censorship in this country. They explain briefly the working of the censorship in Fleet Street, in the Theatre, in the Cinema, at the Customs House, and its slightly inconsistent behaviour with regard to Mr. D. H. Lawrence's pictures. For the first time, in Keeping It Dark (Mandrake Press, 3s. Gd.) the complicated business of film censorship is explained in a comprehensible way. Mr. Causton and Mr. Young, and Miss Rebecca West, in her outspoken preface, are of the opinion that the censorship on the whole " keeps from us the truth about ourselves." They go so far as to say that the net result of the censorship " is to keep the world safe for pornography." We cannot agree with them in this, but we do feel that if there is to be a censor: hip, it should do its work from the point of view of an adult rather than an adolescent public. Keeping It Dark might perhaps have been better named " Lightening our Darkness." The illustrations by Mr. Will Dyson, reprinted from the Daily Herald, are extremely funny, particularly that of the three old gentlemen discussing the suppression of " improper " novels, the right-thinking person commenting, " What we need, my dear sirs, is legislation to prevent our daughters from reading the novels they have written !
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