great battle in the air, with the bombing of the Dutch sea walls.
Thereafter comes the attempt at reconstruction by the Council of
Brissago, a convention of the governing folk of the world--the dream and
deed of the Frenchman _Leblanc_, "a little bald, spectacled man," a
peacemonger whom, till that day of ruin, everyone had thought an amiable
fool. One monarch, "The Slavic Fox," sees in the assembly a chance to
strike for world sovereignty, and the failure of his bomb-fraught planes
and his final undoing in the secret arsenal are breathless pieces of
description.

A subject for wonder is the astonishing advance in the author's
technique. _The World Set Free_ is on an altogether different plane from
_The War of the Worlds_ and those other gorgeous pot-boilers. It
combines the alert philosophy and adroit criticism of the _Tono Bungay_
phase with the luminous vision of _Anticipations_ and the romantic
interest of his eccentric books of adventure. The seer in Mr. Wells
comes uppermost, and I almost think that when the history of the latter
half of the twentieth century comes to be written it will be found not
merely that he has prophesied surely, but that his visions have actually
tended to shape the course of events. Short of _Holsten's_ "atomic
bombs" (which may or may not be developed) Mr. Wells makes a fair
foreshadowing of the uprush of subliminal sanity which may very well be
timed to appear before 1999. I can't take my hat off to Mr. Wells
because I've had it in my hand out of respect for him these last few
years. So I touch my forelock.

* * * * *

_Roding Rectory_ (Stanley Paul) is in many respects the best novel Mr.
Archibald Marshall has written. Those who remember _Exton Manor_ and the
three books dealing with the lives and deeds of the _Clintons_ will
consider this to be high praise, as, indeed, it is meant to be. Mr.
Marshall preserves the ease and amenity of style which we have learnt to
expect of him; he creates his characters--ordinary English men and
women, animated by ordinary English motives--with all his old skill, and
he sets them to work out their destinies in that pleasant atmosphere of
English country life which no one since Trollope's death has reproduced
with greater truth and delicacy than Mr. Marshall. This time, however,
the clash of temperaments and traditions is more severe, the story cuts
deeper into humanity, and the narration of it is, I think, more closel