Only the Stars are NeutraL By Quentin Reynolds. (Cassell. 8s.
6d.) MR. REYNOLDS wrote this book during a stormy and dangerous passage across the North Atlantic last winter. It is lively, changeable and interesting like the North Atlantic in bad weather. It dates, like all books of special correspondence which have not the gift of style. (Mr. Reynolds is very readable, very winning, very interesting, but he has no very individual literary gifts.) But as an account of what was seen and felt in London, Moscow, Cairo, in the desert, on the sea, this book is to be highly recommended. The stories of what the aermans did, and what the various censors did, rival each other. There are engaging stories of personalities, and the life is not taken out of them by British decorum and respect for the pompous. And the lesson is driven home more than once, that this is a people's war in a special sense. They have to take it and dish it out, and the days for "theirs not to reason why " are gone. This war is about something and against something. And what it is about and what it is against. can be better grasped from Mr. Reynolds's narrative than from many more solemn works.
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