who, with the girl whom he married, belonged to the vehement circles of the Labour-Suffragist group, spending a cheerfully ignorant life in a round of meetings, in hunger-striking and whole-hearted support of the pacifism that “seeks peace and ensues it by insisting firmly, and even to blood, that it is the other side’s duty to give way.”  One small concession you must make to Miss HAMILTON’S plot.  It is improbable that, when such a couple as William and Griselda left England in July 1914 to take their honeymoon in a remote valley of the Belgian Ardennes, their friends, knowing them to be without news and ignorant of all speech save English, should have made no effort to warn them.  But, this granted, the tragedy that follows becomes inevitable.  It is so finely told and so horrible (the more so for the deliberate restraint of the telling) that I will say nothing to weaken its effect.  From one scene, however, I cannot withhold my tribute of admiration—­that in which William, alone, brokenhearted, and almost crazed with the ruin of everything that made up his life, creeps home to find his old associates still glibly echoing the platitudes in which he once believed.  A hint here of insincerity or conscious arrangement would have ruined all; as it is, the scene holds and haunts one with an impression of absolute truth, For the end, marked like all by an almost grim avoidance of sentimentality, I shall only refer you to the book itself.  After reading it you will, I hope, not think me guilty of exaggeration when I call it, slight though it is, one for which its author has deserved well of the State.

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The dominant impression left upon me by Miss MERIEL BUCHANAN’S Petrograd the City of Trouble (COLLINS) is that its author is a sportswoman of the first order.  You see her pressing to the windows to observe the shooting in the streets, going out to shop, to dine, to dance, during the stormy months of the various phases of the various Russian Revolutions.  And I hasten to add, for fear of misunderstanding, that there is no suggestion of pose as the heroic Englishwoman.  It was not till the end of 1918 that Sir GEORGE BUCHANAN withdrew from a country in which ambassadorial functions had obviously no reasonable scope.  But he and his family, including our chronicler, his spirited daughter, remained long after there was any plausible reason to hope for the restoration of order and very long after considerations of personal safety might well have dictated and justified retreat.  Mr. HUGH WALPOLE in his preface points out that Miss BUCHANAN is the first English writer to give a sense of the atmosphere of Russia during the New Terror.  It is curious, but the impression she conveys is of something far less formidable than we have imagined.  That may well be due to her high courage which minimised the ever-present dangers.  Another odd impression is that her accounts of current events, e.g.