The extraordinary cleverness of _A Woman's Man_ (HEINEMANN) is the thing which most impresses me about this life story of a French man of letters, at the height of his fame somewhere in the eighteen-nineties. He is made to tell his own story, and pitfalls for the author must have abounded in such a scheme, but Miss MARJORIE PATTERSON seems to have fallen into very few of them. _Armand de Vaucourt_ is a self-deceiving sensualist who justifies his amours as necessary to literary inspiration and neglects his wife only to find, too late, that she has been his guardian angel, her love the source of all that was worth while in his life and work. There have been such characters as _Armand_ in fiction who yet made some appeal to the reader's affection; it is the book's worst defect that _Armand_ makes none. His recurring despairs and passions grow tedious; his final but rather incomplete change of heart left me sceptical as to how long it would have lasted had the book carried his history any further. _Armand_ as a study of a certain type of egoist is supreme; my difficulty was that I had no desire to study him. Even _Maria-Thérèse Colbert_, the decadent wife of his publisher, a very monster among women, is more interesting. Miss PATTERSON is on the side of the angels, but she makes her way to them through some nasty mire, calling spades spades with a vigour which seems to have prevented her from paying much attention to some beautiful and hopeful things which also have everyday names.
_Germany's High Sea Fleet in the World War_ (CASSELL), which is Admiral SCHEER'S addition to the entertaining series, "How we really won after all," by German Military and Naval commanders, gives you, on the whole, the impression of an honest sailor-man telling the truth as he sees it and only occasionally remembering that he must work in one of the set pieces of official propaganda. To a mere layman this record is of immense and continual interest; to the professional, keen to know what his opposite number was doing at a given time, it must be positively enthralling, especially the chapter on the U-boats, with its discreet excerpts from selected logs. Incidentally one can't withhold tribute of reluctant admiration for the technical achievements of the submarines and the courage, skill and tenacity of their commanders and crews. Most readers will find themselves turning first to the account of the Jutland battle. The tale is told not too boastfully, though the Admiral claims too much. Perhaps that may be forgiven him, as he certainly took his long odds gamely and fought his fleet with conspicuous dexterity. Also the German naval architects and ordnance folk proved to have a good thing or two up their sleeves, and the gunnery, for a time at any rate, was unexpectedly excellent. Naturally perhaps Admiral SCHEER may be claimed as supporting the Beattyites rather than the Jellicoists. But he is biassed and goes further than the most extreme of the former school. For his real grievance against the British Navy, constantly finding vent, is that it did not ride bravely in, with bands playing, to the perfectly good battleground prepared with good old German thoroughness under the guns of Heligoland.