If you wish to play the now fashionable game of newspaper-proprietor-baiting you can, with Miss ROSE MACAULAY, create a possible but not actual figure like _Potter_ and, using it for stalking-horse, duly point your moral; or, with Mr. W. L. GEORGE in _Caliban_ (METHUEN), you can begin by mentioning all the well-known figures in the journalistic world by way of easy camouflage, so as to evade the law of libel, call your hero-villain _Bulmer_, attach to him all the legends about actual newspaper kings, add some malicious distortion to make them more exciting and impossible, and thoroughly let yourself go. Good taste alone will decide which is the cleaner sport, and good taste does not happen to be the fashion in certain literary circles at the moment. Of course Mr. GEORGE, being a novelist of some skill, has provided a background out of his imagination. The most interesting episode, excellently conceived and worked out, is the only unsuccessful passage in _Lord Bulmer's_ life, the wooing of _Janet Willoughby_. The awkward thing for Mr. GEORGE is that he has so splashed the yellow over _Bulmer_ in the office that there is no use in his pretending that the _Bulmer_ in _Mrs. Willoughby's_ drawing-room is the same man in another mood. He just isn't. Incidentally the author gives us the best defence of the saffron school of journalism I've read--a defence that's a little too good to believe; and some shrewd blows above (and, as I have hinted, occasionally below) the belt. * * * * * I want to give the epithet "lush" to _The Breathless Moment_ (LANE), and, although the dictionary asks me as far as in me lies to reserve that adjective for grass, I really don't see why, just for once, I shouldn't do what I like with it. Lush grass is generally long and brightly coloured--"luxuriant and succulent," the dictionary says--and that is exactly what MISS MURIEL HINE'S book is. She tells the story of _Sabine Fane_, who, loving _Mark Vallance_, persuaded him to pass a honeymoon month with her before he went to the Front, though his undesirable wife was still alive. In allowing her heroine to suffer the penalty of this action Miss HINE would appear, as far as plot is concerned, to discourage such adventures. But _Sabine_ is so charming, her troubles end so happily and the setting of West Country scenery is so beautiful that, taken as a whole, I should expect the book to have the opposite effect. The picture of a tall green wave propelling a very solid rainbow, which adorns the paper wrapper and as an advertisement has cheered travellers on the Tube for some weeks past, has no real connection with the story, but perhaps is meant to be symbolical of the book, which, clever and well written as it is, is almost as little like what happens in real life. * * * * *