5 JANUARY 1951, Page 8

Moving with that considered deliberation proper to a staid monthly

review, The Nineteenth Century and After has decided, in this first month of the second half of the twentieth century, to call itself—nothing less than The Twentieth Century. I hasten to wish it all success and to express the hope that a step so precipitate will lead to no disaster. But these comments, actually, are unjustified. Sir James Knowles, who founded The Nineteenth Century, would have changed the title to The Twentieth Century in 1900 (which would, in fact, have been a year early), but that another publica- tion—now, I suppose, deceased—had usurped the title. But now that we are nearer to the twenty-first century than to the nineteenth why not go straight to Twenty-First Century and Before ?