Word: tales
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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DECISION AT DELPHI, by Helen MacInnes (434 pp.; Harcourt, Brace; $4.95), is a reasonably diverting romance that is not as taut as it should be because its tale of dark doings in Greece and Sicily is interleaved with too much travel gush. The author's proposition is that a band of left-of-Moscow terrorists in present-day Greece plans to set the Balkans afire by assassinating Marshal Tito. The wandering innocent who runs afoul of and eventually vanquishes these unpleasant plotters is an American architect named Strang. His wily adversary is a monster of plumbless evil who calls...
...stouthearted attempt to win back the desert from the venery-in-Araby school-Paul Bowles and Frederic Prokosch-and return it to the unperfumed condition described by that old camel trammeler, Foreign Legion Novelist Percival Christopher (Beau Geste) Wren. The Legion defends no forts in this tale, but there is an outfit called the Trucial Oman Scouts and there is, as a matter of fact, a defended fort. There is also some rousing prose, not all of it defensible. The book opens with: "Call Aubrey George Grant! The moment had come. My mouth felt suddenly dry. The Court was waiting...
Village of the Damned. The nifty little horror tale of an English town whose populace is briefly paralyzed, its women mysteriously impregnated...
...decides that the real mother is the woman who can pull the child from a chalk circle drawn on the ground. The governor's wife wins the tug-of-war, but Grusha is awarded the child, because she loves him enough not to harm him. The moral of the tale is that the child and the stream must go to those who use them best. Mr. Hancock's cutting of everything dealing with the collective farm is silly politically and dramatically, for the last three lines of the play, "And the valley to the waterers, that it bring forth fruit...
...first two of the three lectures were a novelistic account of the "closed politics" in the historic feud between Sir Henry Tizard and F. A. Lindemann, Churchill's scientific adviser before and through the Second World War. The tale was told, as you might expect, superbly. Snow is a sensitive and gifted man, and a personal knowledge of the scientists involved (as well as how the British government works) made the narrative more alive than it could possibly have been in the hands of a historian. This historic parable was meant to illustrate that, in modern industrial societies, a handful...