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Mr. HORACE BLEACKLEY’S Anymoon (LANE) is a reasonably diverting because superbly improbable account of England under the new Socialist Commonwealth, with Joseph Anymoon, a highly popular Cockney plebeian, as President.  Follows an era of feminist control and a Bolshevist revolution contrived by one Cohen (with the authentic properties, “Crimson Guards” and purple morality), and finally the Restoration through the loyalist Navy, the complacent Anymoon consoling himself with the reflection that if he was a failure as CROMWELL he can at least be a success as General MONK.  Perhaps the wilder critics of the present order have no reason to complain if their impatient generalisations are marshalled, however disingenuously, against them.  But the judicious folk of every school who are now trying to take their bearings may wonder if much is to be gained by putting up and knocking down such flimsy figures of straw.  Mr. HAROLD COX contributes a rather too solemn preface, which labels this otherwise irresponsible novel as a serious tract.  I rather think that the engaging spectacle of the biographer of WILKES and the editor of The Edinburgh (the author of The New Republic surely somewhere in the offing) crouching among the headstones with a candle in a hollow turnip will make a certain appeal to those with a sense of humour and proportion ...  The others may like it even better.

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Nothing could be more attractive than the central idea of The Love Spinner (METHUEN), which is to tell the war-time adventures of a little old lady—­the good fairy of her circle—­whose interest in the heart-affairs of her friends wins her this pleasant if slightly sentimental title.  But, ungrateful as is the task of breaking so innocent a butterfly upon the wheel of criticism, I’m afraid I must add that I think Miss CLARA TURNBULL has hardly carried out her purpose with sufficient discrimination.  In plain fact she has allowed her sympathies to run away with her.  Such a character as Miss Jessie, who goes about doing good, and producing incidentally the most benevolent reactions in confirmed misanthropes, demands to be handled with the nicest care if sentimentality is to be avoided.  Let me put it that Miss TURNBULL has not always been entirely successful in this respect.  Thus, despite some agreeable scenes, the book remains one for the unsophisticated, or for those whose appetite for fictional glucose is robust.  There is not very much that can be called plot; what there is concerns itself with the fortunes of Miss Jessie’s tenants, the chief objects of her ministrations.  In the end an air-raid, of which the details are surely unusual, provides Miss Jessie with the opportunity for a deed of heroism that I am still trying to visualize (her nephew had thrown her down and was protecting her body with his own; but the heroine, seeing this, changed places with her defender “between the flash of the shell’s impact and the explosion”) and finishes, with an appropriately tearful death-scene, a tale that would have been improved by more restraint in the telling.