In so far as essays and criticism are concerned, I
should recom- mend any returning prisoner to read Horizon, New Writing, Day- light, and the old CornhM, which, under the editorship of Mr. Peter Quennell, is taking on a new lease of active life. Mr. Raymond Mortimer's admirable collection of essays and criticisms embodied in Channel Packet should also convince my Lieutenant that human- ism in the modern world is very much alive. More specifically, I should recommend the following eight books, first in the list of which I should place The Unquiet Grave by Palinurus and Mr. Maurice Bowra's The Heritage of Symbolism (Chatto and Windus), which is assuredly one of the most com- prehensive and stimulating works of criticism published in our time. To these I should add six others :—Herbert Read: A Coat of Many Colours (Routledge). V. S. Pritchett: In My Good Bgoks (Chatto and Windus). George Orwell . Inside the Whale (Gollancz). Louis MacNeice : The Poetry of W. B. Yeab (Oxford University Press). Dover Wilson: The Fortunes of Fal- staff (Cambridge University Press). Edmund Wilson : The Woutui and the Box (Secker and Warburg). For " real " biography I shou'd suggest the following eight books, although the list could well be extended :—Peter Quennell : Four Portraits (Collins)—a book which is not only intelligent in itself but written in the most elegant tradi- tion of English prose. Osbert Sitwell : Left Hand! Right Hand! (Macmillan). C. V. Wedgwood : William the Silent (Cape). Jame. Laver: Whistler (Penguin Books). Margaret Cole: Beatrice Webb. V. Sackville West: The Eagle and the Dove (Michael Joseph) Aldous Huxley : Grey Eminence (Chatto and Windus). Una Pope- Hennessy : Charles Dickens (Chatto and Windus). It is difficult, in respect of books on the war, to have any certainty of value. Alan Moorehead's three books, The End in Africa, Mediterranean Front, and the recent Eclipse (Hamish Hamilton) are all triumphs of objective narrative. Richard Hillary's The Last Enemy (Macmillan) and Somerset de Chair's The Golden Carpet (Faber and Faber) have a permanent literary value. And Eve Curie's Journey Among Warriors, as also Captain Maugham's recent book on tank warfare in the desert, should not be missed.
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