The publishers of Miss Ethel Mannin's Confessions and Impressions (Jarrolds.
10s. 6d.) are careful to point out that the authoress does not " indulge' in the fashionable; deplorable practice of being sensational at the expense of celebrities." Miss Mannin herself tells us that her difficulty or " perhaps her saving grace " is that she has never been capable of being impressed by celebrities. Nevertheless something like half of this long autobiography is taken up by so-called portraits of the temporarily famous, some of whom Miss Mannin confesses to having gone a-hunting for, and if a gossip-writer—for she is little more in this part of the book—who describes how a novelist (named) attempted to make love to her is not trying to write sensational stuff, well, perhaps we, prefer the unashamedly sensational after all. Not, of course, that Miss Mannin has deliberately set out to write a merely startling book. She has something new to say here and there, and when she is writing about her own childhood she is on sure enough ground. She can describe scenes vividly, in a good journalistic style. But the trouble is, Miss Mannin does not quite seem to know her own 'Mika, tions. Since she does not refrain from insisting, not merely by implication, on the literary fame of Ethel Mannin, she is not sufficiently an artist to be able to write such things as she does without giving offence. It is never merely what she has to say that shocks one, but the gaucherie, the lack of art, and withal the self-assurance with which it is so constantly said. * * * *
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