New Books
As in other years the spring's book-list contains much biographical material, most of it concerned with the present or immediate past. Biographies are often written before the subject is dead ; auto- biographies and memoirs abound. The age is busy looking at itself in the mirror.
The official life of King George V (Constable) has been written by Harold Nicolson. This volume of nearly 600 pages is lavishly illus- trated, and the author has been allowed unrestricted use of King George's correspondence. The fifth volume of Mr. Churchill's war memoirs, Closing the Ring, is announced by Cassell, which is also publishing in three volumes the definitive edition of Mr. Churchill's war speeches. Yet another volume from Cassell is the biography of Field-Marshal Smuts by his son, J. C. Smuts. This will be the only authoritative biography until the committee responsible for the official biography have dealt with the papers relating to Smuts handed over to the South African Government.
Biographies of war leaders and political figures continue. In Tedder (Collins) Roderic Owen writes the first biography of the Marshal of the R.A.F. who is now Chancellor of Cambridge Univer- sity and Vice-Chairman of the B.B.C. Robert Payne produces General Marshall (Heinemann), a biography which is already a best- seller in the United States. Other books with an American back- ground are Years of Adventure (Hollis and Carter), the first volume of the late President Hoover's memoirs, taking him to the Versailles Conferenee, and The General and the President (Heinemann) in which two American historians, Richard A. Rovere and Arthur E. Schlesinger, give a report of the disniissal of General MacArthur. The Forrestal Diaries (Cassell) from James Forrestal, American Secretary of State who took his own life in 1949, contains his day- by-day feelings on world problems from 1944 when he became Secretary of the Navy, and has a foreword by Viscount Alexander of Hillsborough, who was First Lord of the Admiralty during the war. Among lighter productions is The Thurber Album (Hamish Hamilton), which describes the Ohio environment in which James Thurber grew up.
Biographies dealing with home politics include Stanley Baldwin (Hart-Davis) by G. M. Young, who has been given access to all existing private papers. 'Viscount Simon writes his memoirs in Retrospect (Hutchinson), and Commander Stephen King-Hall begins his autobiography with My Naval Life (Faber). Mosa Anderson's life Noel Buxton ,(Allen and Unwin) is, founded on letters and documents, and Beatrice Webb's Diaries, 1912-24 (Longmans), continuing the story she began in My Apprenticeship, have been edited by Margaret Cole with an introduction by Lord Beveridge.
Among biographies of literary interest is Arnold Bennett (Heine- man) by Reginald Pound, in which letters from Wells, GalsworthY and other literary figures are published for the first time. The first volume of Arthur Koestler's autobiography, Arrow in the Blue, is being published by Hamish tlamilton and Collins together, and Macmillan publishes Rose and Crown the fifth volume of Sean O'Casey's autobiography, which brings him to England and includes his dispute with the Abbey Theatre over The Silver Tassie and pictures of American life. The third volume of Freya Stark's autobiography, The Coast of Incense, is published by Murray, and the Bodley Head publishes Mrs. Robert Henrey's Madeleine Grown Up, in which she describes her life with her mother in London.
Among books of varied interest are a new edition of James Joyce's play Exiles (Cape) with a recently-discovered set of notes by Joyce himself and an introduction by Padraic Colum ; Lord Tweedsmuir'S autobiography, Always a Countryman (Clerke And Cockeran); reminiscences of Osbert Lancaster's first six years, All Done froln Memory (Murray), w'th period illustrations, and Gwen Raverat's memories of an Edwardian childhood at Cambridge, Period Piece_ (Faber), which she, too, has herself illustrated. A new collection of essays by A. A. Milne is entitled Year In, Year Out (Methuen) ; and in a more serious genre is Christianity Past and Present (Cambridge University Press) by Professor Basil Willey who writes as "one whose secular province is literature and who at the same time linos a religious faith indispensable to the conduct and interpretation
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