Bill Platypus's
Paperbacks
There was a Noel Coward song, in those balmy days before the war, in which the rhymes of a song were a series of variations on 'Bellini.' Now at last we can discover the man and music behind the feminine rhyme in Leslie Orrey's Bellint (Dent 85p)„ This is part of the 'Master Musicians' series, which has been consistently elegant and informative. This particular volume follows the familiar pattern of biography first and musicology second — lucid and interesting. For those of you who prefer music in more concrete form, Rayner Banham's Los Angeles (Pelican £1.00) might provide a score. Its cover boasts a painting of Hockney's, which adequately summarises the received myth of the city. But Banham's book is subtitled 'The Architecture of Four Ecologies,' and contains something more than the image of Los Angeles as Fun City. There are many photographs which make the same point, too. But if you like your America on the more thorough and radical side, you might try I. F. Stone's The Truman Era (Wildwood House 90p). This is a collection of Stone's essays between 1945 and 1952, and has all of the merits of Stone at his best. I think that, recently, he has lost some of his touch in losing his independent weekly. These essays and sketches show him when he was most in touch, and most effective.
Going back in time, Platypus has discovered Volume two of Snorri Sturluson's The Olaf Sagas (60p) in the admirable Everyman series. I seem to have mislaid the first volume, which contained an introduction which might have helped me to decipher the sometimes impenetrable heroic rhetoric of the saga, but I get the point and the action even in reading this one volume. It is written in the thirteenth century, about the adventures in the eleventh century. Sturluson. I image, is Norway's Homer.
And Barbara Cartland is our century's Aphra Behn. Arrow Paperbacks have just reissued her The Audacious Adventuress 30p):
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