Light- Hearted Laventne Dirtomar By Daniele Vare, Murray, London. i6/-.
The many in China who know Signor Deniele Vare personally, and the many more who only know him through -his delightful Chinese stories "The Maker of Heavenly Trousers," and "The Gate of the Happy Sparrows," will doubtless welcome his latest book "The Laughing Diplomat." The outher states that when Princess Radziwill heard that he was hovering in his choice between a diplomatic and a musical career, she remarked, "There is a new character for you to -create—The laughing diplomat." Whether it was the advice or the nature of the author is not clear but the book which he has written clearly shows that once he had decided upon what he was to do, he did it with a certain inherent gaiety which continually bubbles forth in his other writing and most definitely in this volume, From Vienna to Peking, then to the Foreign Office in Rome, a delegate to the League of Nations, where he appears to have behaved with a degree of irreverence towards that then august body, back to Peking, Luxemburg, Copenhagen and Berlin, Signor Vare pursued his laughing way. There was not much to laugh about during the years of his service to his country, What with wars, revolutions and the like, but he seems to have acquired a happy knack pf looking at things which he conveys with the utmost facility in his writing.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.