PORTRAIT OF A SPY. By Mr. Temple Thurston. (Putna m's.
7s. tid.)—This book is an adroit combination of extreme conventionality and subtlety. His heroine, Lianc Sonrell (a cabaret performer, and the mistress of an English- man, a German, and a Frenchman) is as beautiful, as tempera- mental, as reckless, and as fascinating as the average person's conception of a woman spy. Her life in Paris with her lover, George Le Mesurier, is conventionally outlined, as is also her rise from the establishment on the Left Bank to the stage of the Folios Bergeres. All this kind of thing has been done before, though seldom more dramatically, since Mr. Temple Thurston is a master in the art of portraying picturesque emotions. But the book's triumph is in the description of the culminating emotions that impelled a brilliant woman to use the War itself as a means of obtaining a personal revenge. The average spy is a tool of war, Liane Sonrell took the war for her tool. There are some tremendously dramatic moments in the book. Mr. Temple Thurston has travelled far indeed from The City of Beautiful Nonsense, but he is still a great sentimentalist, and his book is a success for all that.
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