Many of us who have found a lack of magic in our lives during the last few years will welcome T. H. White's phantasy, "The Sword in the Stone."… Mr. White's book contains the very best brand of magic. He tells us of the childhood of Wart, the youngster who was to become King Arthur, mentor and patriarch of the Knights of the Round Table, and so depends on none other than Merlin for the wizardry and prestidigitation that hurl his little hero into many universes, seat him on...

The moonstruck madness and learned gayety which so appealed to readers of Mr. White's "The Sword in the Stone" comes bubbling along just as merrily in ["The Witch in the Wood"]. What with the presence of old Merlyn, who remembers the future as well as the past, and the author's own habit of making time perfectly elastic, the adventures of Queen Morgause set down here assume a peculiarly sprightly air. Alone in her northern fortress, she takes a complicated beauty-ba...

T. H. White has made … the same assumption which [Leo] Tolstoy made in writing War and Peace: that there are no essential differences between historical characters and people living to-day. For that reason The Sword in the Stone is not just a boy's book about monsters, or a funny book about knights in armour, nor a purely whimsical book like Kenneth Graeme's Wind in the Willows. It has something in common with all these, but has the life and solidity that they lack. The best bits of it ...

[The Sword in the Stone] is riotously funny. Breathlessly, joyously, not at all in the leisurely tempo of old romance, it proceeds with unwearied gusto and endless variety of invention. And we grow increasingly sure that [Sir Thomas] Malory would like it as well as we do. For here his robust English temper has full right of way. Never did the continuity of English life, unchanged down the centuries, shine out more clearly than in this absurd jumble of old and new. Confusions do not matter; do we not move in...

["The Sword in the Stone" is] a crazy cross between, or among, "Stalky & Co.," "Alice in Wonderland," "The Wind in the Willows," "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court," and the creations of Walt Disney. Hearing no voices to the contrary, I assume I make myself perfectly clear. "The Sword in the Stone" is about medieval England, a young boy called the Wart, his slightly older playmate Kay, his eccentric tuto...

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 Sword in the Stone is] a wise book and learned in many ways, and at times boldly absurd or disrespectful; but the best of it is that it creates enough illusion and makes its lore. fascinating enough so that young people will actually learn more about medieval England from it than they will from twenty schoolbooks—and, incidentally, so will the rest of us, including the authors of the books, who never lived in the thirteenth century at all. For in matters of hunting, speech, fighting, castle econ...

T.H. White, whose odd Arthurian grotesque, "The Sword in the Stone," you may remember, has done himself a sequel, which he calls "The Witch in the Wood." Sorry, but it isn't quite as good, the novelty of his special brand of humor, that of anachronism, being pretty well exhausted by the first book. There are some funny oddments in it—the paynim Palomides, who talks babu, and particularly our old friends Sir Grummore and King Pellinore. There are also some fine unico...