The World Around
The World Our Neighbour. By Vernon Bartlett. (Elkin Mathews and Marrot. 6s.) MR. VERNON BARTLETT, as a member of the League of Nations Secretariat, has, of course, no politics, which makes it all the more remarkable that he should have been able to make his weekly broadcast on international affairs so universally popular and interesting. For most of us, deprived of the political motive, would find it difficult to discuss international affairs at all. In this book are collected the more permanently interesting parts of these talks, rewritten in such a way that the book forms a coherent whole, and it disproves once and for all the lingering suspicion that the international field cannot be made interesting to people at large.
We wander with Mr. Bartlett over the surface of the habit., able globe, seeing things as he, and sometimes as his friends, have seen them ; that is, with a very keen eye and balanced judgment; neither judging nor condemning, but learning continually as we go. We learn not merely what has been happening, in far more attractive form than from the news- papers, but also, often by an anecdote occupying only half a page, how it felt to the people to whom it happened. It is a genuine surprise, on dropping the book for a moment after a chapter, to find how much one has learnt, how much better one understands the questions which it discusses. The questions range from the " heritages of war " to the obscurer danger zones in Asia and Europe, touching most things and places on earth by the way.
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