7 JUNE 1957, Page 27

The Shaw-Barker Letters, edited by C. B. Purdom (Phoenix House,

25s.), is a series of detailed tech- nical letters between two great men of the theatre strangled after a mere seventeen years because Helen Huntington, Barker's second wife, could not put up with Shaw. Between them they could easily have kept it up for another twenty years and produced an even more enlightening volume. The book shows as clearly as anything yet pub- lished (and with the benefit of an excellent com- mentary) how no detail was too small for Shaw to think about in the production of his own plays. It will not cause hearts to flutter as the corre- spondence with Mrs. Pat or Ellen Terry did but it is a good book for people who really want to know about GBS, HGB and the Edwardian