Spring Books
Titts spring a number of letters from literary and historical figures are being published Katherine Mansfield's Letters to John Middle- ton Murry (Constable) is to be a third as long again as the earlier volume. Daphne du Maurier has arranged a selection of her grand- father's letters, The Young George du Maurier (Peter Davies), which shows him as a struggling artist and friend of Whistler, Swinburne and Rossetti. The book is illustrated by his drawings. The Letters of Anthony Trollope have been edited by Professor Bradford Allen Booth (Oxford University Press), and are claimed to be "documents of the utmost importance for the full appreciation of Trollope's literary life." Poems and letters hitherto unpublished will appear in a biography, James Thomson : Poet of the Seasons (Cresset Press), by Douglas Grant.
Among memoirs and autobiographies appears Sir Norman Angell's After All (Hamish Hamilton), in which he describes how he was a cowboy in America and a journalist with Northcliffe; his defiance of public opinion in the First World War and his career in Parliament. The fourth and last volume of Andre Gide's Memoirs (Secker and Warburg) will cover 1939-49. Many-Coloured Life : Sketch for an Autobiography (Cape) consists of "random recollec- tions" by Augustus John, now expanded ; the book is illustrated by reproductions of his work and private photographs. Constantinople appears in The Last of the Dragomans (Bles), an account by Sir Andrew Ryan of his work between 1899 and 1924, edited by Sir Reader Bullard, late Ambassador to Persia.
Biographies as usual abound. The second volume of James Pope-Hennessy's life of. Monckton-Milnes is entitled The Flight of Youth (Constable). Leslie Stephen (MacGibbon and Kee), the "first full-length study of the great Victorian agnostic, editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, friend of Huxley, Hardy, George Eliot and Meredith," and father of Virginia Woolf, has been written by Noel Annan. In The Last of the Radicals (Cape) C. V. Wedgwood writes of her uncle, Josiah Wedgwood, forty years an M.P. ; and Lilias Rider Haggard in The Cloak That I Left Hodder and Stoughton) tells the story of her father's life.
War books—not only from the Allied standpoint—continue to appear. The fourth volume of Mr. Churchill's memoirs, The Hinge of Fate (Cassell), is the longest so far and covers the years 1942-3, with journeys to Moscow, Cairo, Casablanca and Washington. Gollancz announces as "perhaps the most important book" it has ever published, We of Nagasaki, by Dr. Tagashi Nagai, now bed- ridden, who has collected the stories of eight survivors of the atom bombing. The Big Show (Chatto and Windus), by Pierre Closter- mann, reminiscences of his career in Fighter Command, is the trans- lation of a book which has had a wide sale in France. General Weygand, in his Recalled to Service (Heinemann), tells a personal story of the war till his arrest by the Gestapo ; and The Metnoirs of Ernst von Weizsiicker (Gollancz), from the one-time head of the German Foreign Office, "vividly presents the moral dilemma in which all non-Nazi civil servants in the Nazi regime found themselves." Books on world politics include Tito and Goliath (Gollancz) by Hamilton Fish Armstrong, editor of Foreign Affairs, a frequent visitor to Yugoslavia and, in 1944, Special Assistant to the American Ambassador in London. Sir Arthur Lothian, who was from 1910 in the I.C.S., was special representative of the Viceroy in the federal discussions Of the Indian States in 1936-7 and was the last British resident in Hyderabad in 1942-6, has written Kingdoms of Yesterday (Murray). Allen and Unwin publish The Antarctic Problem by E. W. Hunter Christie, who became familiar with the dispute between Britain, Argentina and Chile when he worked with the British Embassy in Buenos Aires in 1946-7; and The Rise and Fall of the Japanese Empire by David H. James. Among poetry is a long poem by Walter de la Mare, Winged Chariot (Faber); and Louis Macneice publishes his trans- lation of Goethe's Faust (also Faber) which was conunisiioned by
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