4 APRIL 1941, Page 20

It Was Good While It Lasted. By Henry Longhurst. (Dent.

15$.

MR. LONGHURST, who has found himself " branded irremediably as a writer, thinker and talker on golf," here makes a hearty come-back as an authority on himself and his own life from the time when he sold advertising space in the Hardware Trade journal, got his first break on a little paper called Tee Topics, and then at last by way of the Sunday Times and the Tatter achieved fame and the Evening Standard. Golf has taken hurl around the world, and he writes of everything and everybody that comes in his way with the professional gusto of a newspaper man, whether it's strip-tease, the Crown Prince of GermanY or Lord Castlerosse. Landscape is judged as a possible setting for a golf course, and the reader will not know whether to laugh or cry at what happened to Killarney. " Two hundred acres of deer-cropped, rolling parkland, untouched in centuries by. the hand of man. What a prospect for an architect "—golf architect he means. And he adds with a sure commercial touch: Ns' man would willingly leave a scene like that till it was too dal! to see, and- the profits from the bar must mount accordinglY The book is as readable and trivial as a gossip column—" life's the richer for having known Walter Hagen "—and it is illustrated With most amusing photographs.