Mr. White has now brought to a conclusion the great work which began in 1938 with the publication of The Sword in the Stone. In 1940 The Witch in the Wood and in 1941 The Ill-Made Knight, carried on the tangled story; at last The Candle in the Wind completes a crowded architectural design. The Candle in the Wind is published as the fourth book in an omnibus volume, The Once and Future King, which contains revised versions of the three previous works. The whole 300,000 words make a unity, whose tone appears ...

As a man, but not as a writer, T. H. White may be best compared to Ernest Hemingway. They were more than contemporaries and look-alikes; they were also remarkably close in psychological orientation. Both were big, handsome men, each extremely vital in his approach to life. Yet each was haunted by the very talent he possessed—frightened of not only sudden death but the failure of his powers through the onslaught of age. Both were fatalists, not at all sure that the masses of humanity weren't ta...

In a sense Time is the hero and chief victim of T. H. White's version of the Arthurian legends—Time with his scythe bent out of shape, his beard knotted and his hoary locks adorned by a dunce-cap. If in this guise he resembles old Merlin spinning round as he disappears, or scratching his head while trying to discover whether something has already happened or is about to happen—why, that is precisely how Mr. White means it to be…. In twisting the forelock of Time T. H. White is on...

It is difficult not to do this extraordinary book a disservice by praising it with extravagant enthusiasm. In a world which is overgenerous with its superlatives, the use of such terms as great and good may well be questioned. They should not be questioned in this case. "Mistress Masham's Repose" is a masterpiece of narration, literary ingenuity, humor and satire and Mr. White, on the basis of this book, deserves to be mentioned in the company of Evelyn Waugh, C. S. Lewis and George Orw...

That scholarly, witty and enthusiastic medievalist, Mr. T.H. White, has produced a third fine book devoted to the Arthurian legends. Sir Lancelot of the Lake, the "Chevalier Mal Fet," is the central figure; and the darkly mystic, thwarted character which Mr. White finds him to be dominates the book. Hence "The Ill-Made Knight" is a more thoughtful, adult and subdued piece of writing than "The Sword in the Stone" or "The Witch in the Wood." It has its f...

Mr. White's theme [in The Goshawk] is as old as Babylon but his allusiveness is of the twentieth century. He has the gift of words, which calls for as much effort to control as he who has it not expends in striving after expression. The book is about the training of a hawk, a very ancient art: there is still a freemasonry of falconers—austringers—scattered about the world. Yet, on putting the book down one feels that the goshawk, though central to it, has been secondary to one's ...

["The Goshawk"], widely hailed in England with such phrases as "a masterpiece," "unforgettably interesting," and "an ornithological 'Moby Dick,'" is certainly nature writing with a difference. Ostensibly it describes how the author undertook to train a hawk for the intricate sport of falconry. Actually it is the story of a sick soul which took this unusual method of relieving its frustrations. Mr. White never tells us what reasons other t...

"The Master," subtitled "An Adventure Story," concerns two well-born English children held captive in a hollow rock in mid-Atlantic, where amid the sough of water and air and the whir of a helicopter a murderous antique of a scientist and his grotesque staff have devised a means to rule the world. It is one of the most beguiling and yet one of the most straightforward of Mr. White's tales; and while in some respects it is a new departure for him, it resumes firmly a career...

T.H. White has an outstanding capacity for writing about medieval times as merry and lively days, with their own share of the problems of living and loving, war and peace, but with more than their fair share of fun. His "Sword in the Stone" of last year will be remembered widely and happily for its enchantingly rowdy picture of the boyhood of King Arthur, known as the Wart. ["The Witch in the Wood"] is a sort of sequel in the same rambunctious vein, at once learned and lusty and ...

The Master is an ingenious extravaganza on the borders of science fiction, satire and straight adventure. It has affinities with the Hibbert Journal and the Boy's Own Paper. It reminds me of The Tempest, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, and Lost Horizon with perhaps a breadth of High Wind in Jamaica. Nicky and Judy, children of a duke, land from a yacht on the island of Rockall with their dog and are first pushed into the sea, then shot at, then rescued by the Master's agents. The Master is a phy...

Were there a group libel law in force, it could be invoked by the Irish to put Mr. T. H. White in jail for several thousand years. In "The Elephant and the Kangaroo," Mr. White's new novel, there is enough fun poked at Eire and her inhabitants to fill an indictment longer than the St. Patrick's day parade on a mild March 17. Nothing is spared, not even Irish whiskey, not even Irish piety. Coming from an Englishman it is the sign and seal of social success…. [This is] a sto...

At first glance "The Goshawk" … appears to be a day-to-day account of a curiously personal conflict between a full-grown man and a fledgling hawk. It should be stated at once, however, that this is no mere handbook; although we are introduced to the terminology and furniture of falconry, the information is rather sketchy and incidental. Nor, according to my poor lights, is T. H. White the ideal hawk-master. He quivers excessively; try though he may, he is unable to conceal an inner tumu...

What goes on inside Rockall? A fascinating hypothesis is supplied this week by T. H. White, in [The Master], which he himself describes as 'a simple adventure story with a suppressed moral.' I don't think most readers will want to bother very much about the moral, which is supposedly the fashionable modern one of megalomania, brainwashing and the thirst for absolute power, etc. Nor, oddly enough, does one take the adventure part of the book very breathlessly either…. The real gra...

When a novelist enchanted by one of the world's great matters reaches his third volume, as Mr. White does in his successor to "The Sword in the Stone" and "The Witch in the Wood," he has committed himself to a quest that will not let him go. ["The Ill-Made Knight"] matches the others in virtuosity and wit, and it outdoes them in wisdom, swift, scalpel-sharp, of a kind infrequently consorting with cleverness…. As he should be in any treatment of the Rou...

White's principal subjects [in The Maharajah and Other Stories] are deformity and aberration—both physical and psychological—and the everpresent tension between the rational world with its prescribed forms and the world of elemental passions. The dilemma of a physician who is caught in this tension is skillfully portrayed in "The Maharajah." "A Sharp Attack of Something or Other" recalls the best tales of Saki in its wit and in its faintly sinister atmosphere...

The men & women of Lilliput stood a good six inches in their stocking feet. Mounted on speedy rats and armored in the wing cases of beetles, they hunted mice and moles, and caught fish with horsehair…. They spoke English fluently, but after the manner (somewhat corrupted) of their 18th Century creator, Jonathan Swift. They would say: "He fell Victim to intoxication, and dismounted from his Nag to seek the Safety of the Terra Firma." These descendants of the original (Gulliver'...

["The Elephant and the Kangaroo"] is a satirical fantasy set in Ireland…. The apparatus required for this latest demonstration of White magic includes one "practical" Englishman, who looks like the author and bears his name, thinks like an encyclopedia, does oil paintings adorned with glass eyes stuck to the canvas with putty, and lives on an Irish farm; his landlord, Mikey O'Callaghan, an Irish Jeeter Lester; his landlord's wife, whose resistance to reason i...

If "The Witch in the Wood" is not a spurious book, I shall eat my hat or seek the Questing Beast therein mentioned. That thousands may read Mr. White's new book, as they did his previous "The Sword in the Stone" is possible. Many things are possible. The book is definitely meant to be funny. It spares no efforts in that direction. It has a toodle-oo type of humor sometimes to be found in the Englishman who has been intellectually arrested on the threshold of the sixth form...

[The Maharajah and Other Stories] is a uniquely charming miscellany of the supernatural, the grotesque and the beautiful. White is preeminent among that distinguished little band of English writers for whom rural pursuits, the English countryside and children are a never-diminishing lode of curiosity and fantasy. This is seen to chilling effect in "The Spanish Earl," a captivating piece of grotesquerie about a noble boy in the reign of Charles II, who lived as a well-kept dog…. Although...