21 FEBRUARY 1964, page 30

Journey Without Maps

MR. JAMES PURDY is a writer sui generis. The exact flavour of his style is hard to describe; he is wry, farcical at times, and some of his charac- terisation is close to......

Novels

The Violent Christian The Heavenly Mandate. By Erwin Wickert. (Deutsch, 18s.) The Heavenly Mandate, which tells, in more or less novel form, the history of the Taiping Re-......

Knowing The Facts

A Calendar of Murder. By Terence Morris and Louis Blom-Cooper. (Michael Joseph, 30s.) 'Tots book,' say the authors in their introduc- tion, 'is not a polemical contribution to......