Jane. “I THINK IT MUST BE THEM RUBBER ’EELS YOU WEARS, MA’AM.”]

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OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

(By Mr. Punch’s Staff of Learned Clerks.)

Mr. JOHN HASTINGS TURNER, who had already to his credit a play, a novel and various successful revues, has now produced, in A Place in the World (CASSELL), what is, I understand, to some extent a fictional version of his play.  How far this may be so I am uncertain (not having seen the play), but I am by no means uncertain that it makes here a wholly admirable story, one moreover that shows a notable advance in Mr. TURNER’S art as novelist, being firmer in touch and generally more matured than anything he has yet written.  The plot concerns the adventures, spiritual and other, of Madame Iris Iranovna, pampered cosmopolitan beauty, when fate or her own egotistical whim had dumped her as a temporary dweller in the semi-detached villas of suburbia.  The theme, you observe, is one that might excuse the wildest farce, since the effect of Iris upon her unfamiliar surroundings was naturally devastating.  Mr. TURNER however has chosen the more ambitious path of high comedy.  In Iris herself, and even more in the kindly old vicar who so unexpectedly confronts her with her own weapons of wit and worldly wisdom, he has drawn two characters of genuine and moving humanity.  I shall not tell you how the conflict (essential to real comedy) works itself out, nor after what fashion the empty brilliance of Iris is humiliated and transformed.  If I have a criticism of Mr. TURNER’S method, it is that, as with Bunthorne, a “tendency to soliloquy” is growing upon him which will need watching.  But he clothes his reflections pleasantly enough.  Already known as what the old lady called “an agreeable rattlesnake,” he has now proved himself a story-teller of conspicuous promise.

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VON FALKENHAYN’S General Headquarters 1914-1916 and its Critical Decisions (HUTCHINSON) seems an honester book than LUDENDORFF’S; less political, less querulous, less egoistic.  VON FALKENHAYN, who was War Minister when the War began and retained his office after he had superseded VON MOLTKE as Chief of the General Staff, shows himself incurably Prussian, refusing even to consider the possibility that any State which could wage war effectively would hesitate to do so from any ethical or humanitarian scruple.  “Don’t bother about a just cause, but see that it appears just before men,” he seems to say.  “The surprise effect of gas (at Ypres) was very great,” is all the comment that tragic episode draws from him.  He was a submarine campaign whole-hogger.  But he has his own soldierly virtues of modesty and loyalty, and refuses to air his personal grievances in the matter of his supersession by the HINDENBURG-LUDENDORFF syndicate.  If, as seems likely, he speaks the truth, as he had opportunity