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Bill (who has just acquired a trench periscope). "Here y'are, Alf. Now you watch me. This is how to get 'em."

Peter Paragon, Mr. John Palmer's novel, which finds itself in Martin Secker's intriguing Spring list, is a version of the old Odyssey of youth in search of love. Unlike our latest fashionable heroes, who arrive at their approximate solutions through successive experiments of varying degrees of seriousness, Peter, a thoroughly serious person from his earliest years, steers clear of rocks of temptation and shoals of false emotion, finally bringing his unwrecked galley safe into harbour. So much distinctly to the good. But here's a curious book. On page 60, Peter's father, conscientious clerk, admirable gardener, ineffectual anarchist, whose relations with his son are quite charmingly described and realised, is brought home dead from a street meeting with a bullet through his brain. Some serious effect of so unusual a happening is no doubt intended? Not at all. It simply marks the end of a chapter and the beginning of others in a quite new key. Peter, made rich by a successful uncle, goes up to Oxford, to Gamaliel, becomes inevitably "Peter Pagger," and leads a set of intellectuals who sharpen their wit by elaborate ragging. An old Gamaliel man may be assumed to speak with authority, as here he certainly does with sprightliness, of several of the traditional rags of recent years, adding in a burst of creative exuberance the diverting adventure of the trousers of the Junior Prior. Peter, sent down, and established in London, wearies of the intellectuals of Golder's Green and Clement's Inn, and drifts reverently into upper circles. Here, to be candid, his creator slips into something perilously near The Family Herald, tempered of course by the Gamaliel manner. No, the part about the dying Earl, and Lady Mary, who believed so immensely in herself and her order, won't do. And if the other parts about the naughty granddaughter of the farmer, and Vivette, the musical comedian, and the return of Miranda will do (of which I'm not sure), at least they don't fit. In fact I'm not quite convinced that Mr. Palmer has not been indulging in a little literary rag of his own for our confusion.

Probably by this time most readers of memoirs have pleasant associations with the name of Mrs. Hugh Fraser, so that her latest volume, More Italian Yesterdays (Hutchinson), will need little recommendation. If you love Italy and enjoy anecdotal history, ancient and modern, served in a medium of pleasant gossipy talk, you will like this book. Much of it might perhaps more aptly be described as Italian days-before-yesterday. There are, for example, some chapters on the sanguinary affairs of mediæval Naples, and others―more interesting―about the rise and fall of King Murat. For these last alone the book would be well worth reading. But what I have always liked most about Mrs. Hugh Fraser's style is its versatility. Discursive is an inadequate word. She is fully capable of ranging in a paragraph from the horrors of Bourbon cruelty to the engaging naughtiness of her nephews. As she herself says, "With the best intentions in the world I start to tell the story of some great person... and in the middle of the tale the sun strikes on my page―a child laughs across the street... and farewell to the historic train of thought! My hero or saint recedes into the shadows, and relinquishes the canvas to a thousand amiable little sprites of memory who hold it till they have frisked through the very last step of their dance." Which exactly, and far better than I could do it myself, indicates the charm of her book. I loved especially a story she tells―in connection with nothing―of how her