Books in Brief

Winston Churchill and the Second Front, by Trumbull Higgins (Oxford, $6.00). Mr. Higgins has bundled together a great many quotations and references (index and notes comprise one fourth of the book) in a very stupid indictment of Winston Churchill for opposing a Second Front in France. He charges, among other things, that Churchill 1) had learned the bloody lessons of World War I, and did not want to fight the Germans head-on again if he could help it; 2) wasn’t terribly anxious to do so just for the Soviets; 3) didn’t think Generals Marshall, Eisenhower, et al (who were anxious) knew much about Grand Strategy, and 4) did think that he, Churchill, knew a lot about it and acted that way. No arguments there. Rather, too bad this “indictment” cannot further charge Churchill with having had his way. Mr. Higgins has done more to enhance his subject’s prestige than any admirer could, for a friend would have felt constrained to mention Churchill’s many mistakes, e.g., backing Tito. But the author concentrates only on Churchill’s successes; and the irrelevant fact that Higgins sees it all through the wrong end of the glass is his tough luck, not Churchill’s. j. p. mcfadden

The Conscience of the Rich, by C. P. Snow (Scribner, $3.95). Charles Percy Snow, who has been knighted as a civil servant, scientific administrator and physicist, is also a novelist of the first rank. The Conscience of the Rich is the seventh in a sequence of novels conceived in 1935, the whole to be known as Strangers and Brothers and to be a group portrait of the “new men,” the contemporary British soul. This enterprise already gives the strongest evidence of being a massive literary landmark. It diminishes but little from the whole to report that The Conscience of the Rich is a less well appointed story of this edifice. Snow’s strength is his exceptional penetration into complex personal relationships; his weakness is a lack of colorful and towering imagination. This is fatal here because his subject is a great Anglo- Jewish family. Without going to the sacred ark of Jewish tradition, without seeing the conflicts of the present in the light of the manycandled past, the story of young Jews in rebellion against their elders becomes, as here, the petty and inconsequential shadow-play of insignificant individuals. Snow does not really feel or know his subject. But this does not make him less than he is at best—a novelist of subtle craft and power.

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Winston Churchill and the Second Front, by Trumbull Higgins (Oxford, $6.00). Mr. Higgins has bundled together a great many quotations and references (index and notes comprise one fourth of the book) in a very stupid indictment of Winston Churchill for opposing a Second Front in France. He charges, among other things, that Churchill 1) had learned the bloody lessons of World War I, and did not want to fight the Germans head-on again if he could help it; 2) wasn’t terribly anxious to do so just for the Soviets; 3) didn’t think Generals Marshall, Eisenhower, et al (who were anxious) knew much about Grand Strategy, and 4) did think that he, Churchill, knew a lot about it and acted that way. No arguments there. Rather, too bad this “indictment” cannot further charge Churchill with having had his way. Mr. Higgins has done more to enhance his subject’s prestige than any admirer could, for a friend would have felt constrained to mention Churchill’s many mistakes, e.g., backing Tito. But the author concentrates only on Churchill’s successes; and the irrelevant fact that Higgins sees it all through the wrong end of the glass is his tough luck, not Churchill’s. j. p. mcfadden

The Conscience of the Rich, by C. P. Snow (Scribner, $3.95). Charles Percy Snow, who has been knighted as a civil servant, scientific administrator and physicist, is also a novelist of the first rank. The Conscience of the Rich is the seventh in a sequence of novels conceived in 1935, the whole to be known as Strangers and Brothers and to be a group portrait of the “new men,” the contemporary British soul. This enterprise already gives the strongest evidence of being a massive literary landmark. It diminishes but little from the whole to report that The Conscience of the Rich is a less well appointed story of this edifice. Snow’s strength is his exceptional penetration into complex personal relationships; his weakness is a lack of colorful and towering imagination. This is fatal here because his subject is a great Anglo- Jewish family. Without going to the sacred ark of Jewish tradition, without seeing the conflicts of the present in the light of the manycandled past, the story of young Jews in rebellion against their elders becomes, as here, the petty and inconsequential shadow-play of insignificant individuals. Snow does not really feel or know his subject. But this does not make him less than he is at best—a novelist of subtle craft and power.