After the Day:  Germany Unconquered and Unrepentant (JENKINS) is the kind of thesis-book which it is wise to read in a deliberately incredulous mood.  Mr. HAYDEN TALBOT is an American newspaper man of immense resourcefulness but, I should judge, of a not conspicuously judicial habit of mind.  That, perhaps, is hardly a newspaper man’s business.  He is after copy, and certainly there’s good enough copy in his interviews with Count BERNSTORFF and Dr. RATHENAU, and one must admire his feat of getting out of these and seven other German publicists, including MAXIMILIAN HARDEN, the draft of a manifesto to the people of America, composed in the hope, vain as it happened, that the KAISER would break his long silence and sign it.  It is the author’s theory that it is the inner camarilla, working for a speedy restoration of the monarchy, that is responsible for the certainly uncharacteristic reticence of Amerongen.  Mr. TALBOT also interviewed HINDENBERG, whom he found a “broken-down, inconsequential, garrulous example of senility” LUDENDORFF, who was very stiff and proud and rude; and the fiancee of the man who sank the Lusitania.  His general idea of Germany is summed up in the remark of Mr. MANDELBAUM, of New York:  “All this talk about Fritz being down and out is all bunk!” Germany is full of energy and hate; she will soon be a monarchy again; will undersell the world; is assiduously preparing for air supremacy as the way to revanche.  I take it that this is not so much a book as a rechauffe of newspaper articles, which alone will account for its formlessness and frequent changes of plane.  Mr. TALBOT, confessing to a total ignorance of the German tongue, seems quite unconscious that this imposes certain limitations on his capacity to make an adequate survey of a difficult problem.

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I may confess at once that I finished the first chapter of The Woman of the Picture (HODDER AND STOUGHTON) in a mood of slight derision, induced by Mr. G.F.  TURNER’S allowing one hero to say of the other that he had “the interminable limbs” of an aristocrat.  To the end of the book indeed I was uncertain whether such occasional lapses were meant to illumine the character of the supposed speaker or were unintentional.  But again to quote, this time a phrase in which Mr. TURNER clearly shares my own delight, “before we were through with the affair” such details had ceased to be of moment.  The plain fact is that The Woman of the Picture is the most breathless, irresistible piece of convincing impossibility you have read for ages.  I decline to struggle with any transcription of the plot.  On the wrapper you will observe the woman stepping bodily out of the picture, like the ancestors in the whisky advertisement; this, however, is a symbolic rather than an actual presentment.  But there is plenty without it:  a rightful heir, mountain castles amid the eternal snows, a villain (with sorceries),