6 AUGUST 1927, Page 25

SOME LEFT-HANDED MARRIAGES. By E. B.

D'Auvergne. Illustrated. (Hutchinson. 18s.) — Mr. D'Auvergne is modest and disarming, for he quite frankly admits that his volume is " not addressed to the serious student." At the same time it contains (for a certain public) much entertaining and picturesque reading concerning the misalliances and irregular and secret unions of royalty, and, if a moral is sought in his pages, it is that these Cinderellas of royal history seldom lived happily ever afterwards. The style of the book is what is known in certain quarters as " snappy," but Mr. D'Auvergne might well rid his pages of many rather vulgarly colloquial flowers, and cease to talk of a clergyman as the Revd. Gunn " or of a bishop's wife as a bishopess."