Memories
by .Oxford University Press, $3.50.
The late Sir Desmond MarCarthy, critic of the London Sunday Times, was a discriminating commentator on books and authors, endowed with the happy faculty of warmly projecting his enjoyment of literature and his boundless interest in the quirks of human nature. The people he writes about in these agreeable essays are for the most part well-known figures such as Trollope, Maupassant, Arnold Bennett, Wells, Lytton Strachey, Maugham, Joyce, Max Beerbohm. But MacCarthy usually has something fresh and personal to say about them. His book is a cheering reminder, at a time when most books of literary criticism are hugely forbidding, that criticism can at times be very pleasant stuff to read.