I am distinctly grateful to ROSE MACAULAY for _What Not_ (CONSTABLE). It brought me the pleasantest end to anything but a perfect English Spring day. She has wit, not so common a gift that you can afford just to take it for granted; she knows when to stop, selecting not exhausting; and she makes her epigrams by the way, as it were, without exposing the process of manufacture. (Other epigrammatists please copy.) Miss MACAULAY'S "prophetic comedy" is a joyous rag of Government office routine, flappery, Pelmania, Tribunals, State advertising, the Lower Journalism and "What Not." That audacious eugenist, _Nicky Chester_, first Minister of Brains in the post-war period of official attempts to raise the nation from C3 to something nearer A1 on the intellectual plane, happens, because of his family history, to be uncertified for marriage. He also happens to fall very desperately in love with his secretary, _Kitty Grammont_, and the conflict between duty and desire becomes the theme--perhaps just a little too heavy--of an extravaganza that is happiest in its lighter and more irreverent moments. Which is to say that _What Not_ wanders out of the key. But what on earth does that matter if one is made to laugh quite often and to smile almost continuously at a very shrewd piece of observation, whimsicality and tempered malice? And you will like the serene _Pansy Ponsonby_ (out of "Hullo, Peace!"), who could scarcely be called _Kitty's_ "sister-in-law," but was of the most faithful. The odd thing is that under all her gibing the author seems to have a queer furtive admiration for her precious Ministry of Brains. * * * * *