* *

One has heard so often of works of "absorbing interest" that appeared
at "the psychological moment" that one feels a bit squeamish about
applying these phrases even to such a book as Mr. HARRY DE WINDT'S
_Russia as I Know It_ (CHAPMAN AND HALL); but honestly their
appropriateness cannot be denied in view of the author's peculiar
knowledge of the too mysterious country on which interest just now
is so poignantly concentrated. He has not only traversed Siberia as
few, even Russians, have done--that is an old though still thrilling
story--but he has ranged at large over the whole country from Finland
to the Crimea (the only two parts, by the way, which he has made me
thirst to visit), and has gone with his eyes open. In the present
volume, touching only incidentally on his journeyings and still less
on politics, he has tried to satisfy the thousand-and-one questioners
who, one imagines, have been plaguing him not a little lately as to
those intimate details that really count in the life of a nation. He
tells us for instance how the Russians do business and keep out the
cold; how many of the women you could call pretty, and how much mutton
a Kirghiz can eat. Though some of this is not new, yet the book has,
as a whole, a most vivid freshness, and, if in the end the main effect
is to make one content to live out of Russia, that is a tribute to the
writer's frankness. At the least one is able to rejoice in his final
verdict of unqualified enthusiasm for his hosts, since he found not
merely acquaintances ready to welcome the popular English, but true
and trustworthy friends in all classes of the community.

* * * * *

MRS. OLIVER ONIONS has a light puckish humour and a smooth if
over-hasty pen, and I don't think she quite does her own intelligence
(or ours) full justice in _The Bridge of Kisses_ (HUTCHINSON). I liked
her flapper heroine, _Joey_, and the naughty nephews, the _O.U.2's_,
and her sapper lover, _The Bridge Builder_, who was a confoundedly
long time over his work, by the way, but ultimately came into his own
over his own bridge of kisses, built under a heavy barrage of needless
misunderstandings. But _Joey's_ pipsqueak shirker _fiance_, _Hilary_,
was altogether too foolish a travesty of a man ever to have gained her
hand or, having gained it, to have held it against any real male in
or out of khaki. The fact is that "BERTHA RUCK" can achieve something
better than these