In its quiet unobtrusive way When Michael Came to Town (HUTCHINSON) is a most excellent specimen of Madame ALBANESI’s art.  No sound of war is to be heard in it, and when I think how completely some of our novelists have failed when trying to deal with contemporary events I cannot be too thankful that this novel is laid in a period before the Germans became an uncivilised nation. Olive, the heroine, a delightful girl, is the supposititious child of Sir James Wenborough, whose wife, in his absence and without his knowledge, secured her as a substitute for their own child, who died at its birth.  The secret is disclosed by an unscrupulous minx, who uses the knowledge she has obtained to push her way into the Wenborough household.  Men are not Madame ALBANESI’S strongest points, but in Roderick Guye and Michael Wenborough we have well-contrasted characters, and the worst that can be said of them is that they belong to rather stock types.  Altogether a book which many people will describe as “perfectly sweet;” but, because of its sympathetic qualities and sound workmanship, it deserves a more distinctive label.

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When the lean brown hero with the hawk lip extends an arm of steel from the six-cylinder Rolls-Royce in which he is lounging and snatches the beautiful mannequin from between the very jaws of an omnibus, we realise that we are in the presence of Romance in its purest form.  A spin in the Park and a cosy dinner in a Soho restaurant are quite sufficient to convince hero and heroine that they are each other’s own.  Some novelists would let it go at that, but not Mr. ARTHUR APPLIN, who has only got to chapter II, and wishes to give us value for our money.  What’s to come is, as SHAKSPEARE says, still unsure, but apparently the heroine, who has gone to break the happy news to a poor but respectable aunt in Devonshire, is met at the country station by a chauffeur, who calls her “Lady Alice” and waves her towards a large Limousine.  She knows she isn’t Lady Alice and has no car to meet her, but she hops in nevertheless.  She doesn’t know where she is going, but she is on her way.  There is a smash, and when the heroine comes to she is being called Lady Alice in an ancestral castle.  Everything has been obliterated from her memory, including her own identity and that of the hero, and the author can now make a fresh start.  If you wish to know how it all ends you must get The Woman Who Was Not (WARD, LOCK), but there is no compelling reason why you should.

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[Illustration:  “OH, YOU AWFUL BOY—­YOU’VE LEFT THE TACKS IN THE ROAD, AND NOW THE TANK’LL GET A PUNCTURE.”]

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AIR-RAID FASHIONS AT MANCHESTER.

    “Monday commences the final week of Sir Thomas Beecham’s SEASON
    OF NIGHTY PROMENADE CONCERTS".—­Manchester City Press.