Shorter Notices
Coventry's Heritage. By Levi Fox. (" The Coventry Evening Tele- graph." 6s.)
DEFOE, visiting Coventry at the beginning of the eighteenth century, said that, with its protruding timber-built houses, the city might " be taken for the very picture of the City of London, on the south side of Cheapside before the Great Fire." Mr. J. B. Priestley said of it before the air-raids : " I was surprised to find how much of the past, in soaring stone and carved wood, still remained." The flourishing mediaeval town is apt to be forgotten under the twentieth- century industrial one, or, indeed, under war-time notoriety ; but Mr. Fox, in this history-cum-guideboOk, gives a list of buildings worth seeing which with photographs runs into well over twenty pages. This book has some concise chapters on the history—from the origins as a settlement round a monastery through various economic changes from trade in wool and cloth to clocks, ribbons and finally cycles, motor-vehicles and aircraft. The affairs of individual towns
tend to read to the outsider as rather small beer, but Mr. Fox has avoided too much detail, and describes the lives of the people and the look of the place as well as events in a workmanlike if not distinguished style. There are some unusual additions in a book of this type—a biographical list of eminent people (including, of course, George Eliot) connected with the town, a guide to the monuments, a list of books on Coventry history and a serviceable index. There are many well-produced illustrations, and altogether this is a useful little volume of its kind.
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