Miss Ella Hepworth Dixon's As I knew Them (Hutchinson, 21s.)
and Ben Turner's (he would be the first to disdain the necessity for the honorific Mr.)About Myself (Toulmin, 10s. 6d.) are two books of reminiscences strangely different in milieu and scope. Miss Hepworth Dixon's contains what this talented journalist recalls of some scores of persons she has known or known about in the great world—persons dis- tinguished, interesting, notorious or odd, and the brightly.' written chit-chat she pours out so lavishly about them should certainly entitle her later on to a prominent position in' Gossip Writers' Corner. About Myself strikes a different key.. In an artless, simple style—a simplicity which is marked, how- ever, by a very definite strength—the author treats of his career of strenuous, though always genial, struggle, which brought him to the Mayor's chair in Batley and to the high place which he holds in the ranks of political Labour to-day. With interest and sympathy we follow those hungry, hard-worked, days he passed through as a lad when he worked for ten and a half hours a day as " a piecener in a woollen mulegate," and when " a helpful radicalism was breathed into my life from my untutored, unlettered father." The book reveals a strong, an earnest and a lovable personality which wants `` to see in the next twenty years a push forward in gentlenesi of life." And so say all of us.
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