[In "George: An Early Autobiography,"] Emlyn Williams, the actor and playwright … tells us how he made the long march from a poverty-stricken Welsh village … to the London stage, where he got his first part at the age of twenty-one. He did it one step at a time, one scholarship after another, the last and most splendid to Oxford, where it was assumed that he would improve his great opportunity by preparing for a government job. The book requires such adjectives as charming and likable. His is a rare, happy success story—the demands of a young nobody's personality were met against long, long odds. Unlike most writers of success stories, Williams isn't looking back in complacency. His qualities are, by good fortune, literary virtues—a memory for detail, a broad but not uncritical affection for past places, things, and people, and a sense of proportion that restores them...