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The best I can honestly say of Tony Heron (COLLINS) is that it has all the makings of a good novel, but unfortunately stops there, unmade or rather unvitalized.  It is the tale of a boy’s upbringing by a sternly antagonistic father, of his growth to maturity, his love affairs, and in due course his relations with his own son.  All the events happen that are proper to a scheme of this type; but somehow, despite the fact that Mr. C. KENNETT BURROW wields a practised and often picturesque pen, the whole affair remains a literary exercise and declines to come alive.  Perhaps in justice I should except two characters, Roland, the sturdy-son born out of wedlock to Tony, and Phil, weakling child of old Heron by a second marriage.  Both these and the relation of the pair to each other furnish a pleasant contrast to the anaemia which seems to affect the rest of the tale.  Stay, there is yet another, Kenrick, the private tutor of Tony, whose treatment by the author is at least vigorous.  I found him just a little surprising.  A creature, we are told, over fond of good food and wine, who, dining with his pupil on the latter’s sixteenth birthday and attempting convivial airs, is shown his place with a promptitude recalling the best manner of the eighteenth century.  Subsequently, one gathers, he took to chronic alcoholism, combined with amateur blackmail; and a final appearance shows the fellow dribbling wine over the evening shirt, to whose wear the author is at pains to tell us he was unused.  Clearly a low race, these tutors, about whom I seem hitherto to have been strangely misinformed.

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Captain ROBERT B. ROSS has made excellent business of The Fifty-First in France (HODDER AND STOUGHTON).  In any case there could be no doubts about the merits of this famous Scottish territorial division; it is one of the very many British divisions which has proved itself the best of all.  I recall its first appearance at the Front as a constituted unit, and can speak to it that the impression its arrival caused was welcome and comforting.  But our author is not only a soldier; he has also the literary art.  Clearly he appreciates that a fine subject is not all that is wanted to make a good book; that one needs, for instance, the gift of observation, the power of conveying an impression, and a reserve of humour always ready at need.  All these are his in abundance.  His book treats of two earlier periods of the war; the second, the long-drawn offensive of the Somme, will make the most intimate appeal to men of his own and the other divisions involved.  To those who knew the affair at first hand the story will recall much that they saw and felt themselves; often they will recognise a map-reading or will come across the name of a humble billet which they too regarded as a paradise replete with every modern comfort.