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THE name of George Sand evokes the image of a woman who was the grande passion of Chopin’s life; who liked to wear a man’s costume; and who was the author of innumerable novels which nowadays are seldom read. She is one of the few writers whose life story—currently recounted by André Maurois in Lélia (Harper, $5.00) — is more durably fascinating than any of their fictions.

Née Aurore Dupin in 1804 — the product of a background in which aristocracy and illegitimacy were picturesquely intertwined — George Sand became the queen of French Letters in her day; and her work was greatly admired by such masters as Flaubert, Dostoevski, and later Proust. But M. Maurois has not encumbered his narrative with critical apologetics for a neglected genius. Draw ing on much hitherto unpublished material, including many intimate letters, he has given us a rich biography of a truly extraordinary woman — a close-up of the life of the heart in the Romantic Era.

Like most extraordinary beings, George Sand is — superficially — a creature full of paradox. This grande amoureuse, to whom no end of brilliant men succumbed, was a strikingly masculine figure wit h a fondness for smoking large cigars. This woman who jettisoned — and, some said, destroyed — so many lovers was ruled, above all, by the maternal instinct: what she sought out was weakness: she wanted lovers who would be sons. She epitomized in her life the Romanticism of her century, responded to all its doctrines and ideals; but no bourgeois could have been more unwaveringly industrious. One can readily understand the mortification of her lovers who, even in the first fine frenzy of a new romance, found themselves banished daily from Madame’s presence while she turned out her statutory twenty pages of copy.

Heine has left us a portrait which does not altogether explain her tremendous appeal: “Beautiful auburn hair falling to her shoulders; rather lustreless and sleepy eyes, but calm and gentle; a smile of great good nature; a somewhat . . . husky voice, difficult to hear, for George is far from talkative.” Her magnetism no doubt stemmed in part from a stunning vitality. She would often write for fourteen hours at a stretch, then mount her horse and gallop miles to a lover’s rendezvous.

Maurois’s biography of Madame Sand convincingly resolves the apparent paradoxes; and the life of its heroine is expertly fitted into the immensely lively picture of her times. Léila (the title is taken from one of George Sand’s novels) is perhaps the most solid achievement of a famous biographer whose works are always inviting but not always solid.

H. St. John Philby — the author of Arabian Jubilee (John Day, $6.00), a biography of Abdul-Aziz ibn Abdul-Rahman ibn Faisal Al Saud, by the Grace of Allah King of Saudi Arabia — has long been a legendary figure in the Middle East. In 1917, he was sent by the British Government to enlist Ibn Saud as an ally against the Turks, and he has since spent most of his life in Arabia — as explorer, director of a mining concern, and intimate friend and adviser of the King. After his conversion to Islam in 1930, he joined Ibn Saud’s court and today describes himself as a “cit izen ” of Mecca.

Philby writes, of course, as a partisan. But the notable thing is that, however deep his loyalties and strong his antipathies, he retains a firm grasp of the realities of the Arab World, a far greater clarity of vision than you find in most of the leading texts about the Middle East. There is no trace in his book of the silliness of some British Arabists such as Frey a Stark, who, because she so dearly loved the Arabs, tried to convince her readers that the Arabs (when they confided in her over tea and cookies) were really pro-British at heart. And Philby is not seduced by the mystique of Pan-Arabism into wishful thinking about the extent of Arab unity, as was so scholarly an authority as George Antonius, the author of The Arab Awakening. He seems a tough-minded man, Philby, both passionate and shrewd.

Of the Arab League, he writes: “Whether [it] can survive the internal stresses of a house divided against itself is very much open to doubt.” While wholly conv inced that the Jews have no right whatsoever to Palestine, he concluded long ago that a Jewish state would come into being, and he affirms that the Arabs conducted themselves with a suicidal lack of realism. In 1939, he suggested that Dr. Weizmann enlist Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s support for a startling plan of which Philby was the author: “The whole of Palestine should be left to the Jews. . . . All Arabs displaced therefrom should be set t led elsewhere at the expense of the Jews. . . . All Asiatic Arab countries . . . should be formally recognized as completely independent in the proper sense of the term.” What misery, and how many current headaches, that proposal might have averted!

Philby describes, with a wealth of inside detail, Ibn Saud’s dashing conquest of Arabia; the life of his court; the dramatic discovery of oil and the incongruous changes it has brought to the desert kingdom; Ibn Saud’s role in the struggle over Palestine (he never seriously considered canceling the oil concessions); his present relations with the other Arab countries and his attitude towards the global conflict between Russia and the West. The salient features of this story have been presented to American readers before — in simpler terms and bolder colors. But to anyone with a special interest in the Middle East, Arabian Jubilee is a fascinating volume. It is certainly a notable addition to the basic writings about the Arab World.

Early in 1952, Eleanor Roosevelt set out to the Middle East and India “to get an insight into the people and their problems.” India and the Awakening East (Harper, $3.00) is her warmhearted, open-minded. Girl Scoutish report on that journey, which took her from the Lebanon to the Himalayas, via Syria, Jordan, Israel, Pakistan, and India.

Mrs. Roosevelt talked with chiefs of state, leading women, welfare workers, American officials; she visited mills, schools, refugee camps, the homes of the poor. She was especially interested in Point Four activities, social work, and the status of women. She also went shopping in the Damascus Bazaar; saw the Taj Mahal by moonlight; attended a durbar in Baluchistan; rode up the Khyber Pass; nervously made a speech on a two-tiered stand mounted on wheels and harnessed to camels; was often late for formal dinners and followed the practice of her imperturbable Aunt Edith — she just showed up in her traveling clothes.

In an untidy sort of way, Mrs. Roosevelt manages to be extremely readable, and she has a good deal to say that is well worth saying, even if much of it is moderately familiar. What is best in her book is 1) its sympathetic picture, drawn in human terms rather than statistics, of the struggle that India and Pakistan are putting up to cope with their gigantic problems; 2) the thoughtful discussion of why Asiatic nationalism has been so receptive to Communist propaganda and so distrustful of the West.

Another recent title deals, in an altogether different vein, with the gulf between East and West. In 1945, an American girl from Kansas met, and presently married, a poor, poetryquoting Persian who lived in a Greenwich Village basement and was rumored to be a Lord of sorts in his own land. Several years later, Anne Sinclair Mehdevi and her husband were summoned to Persia by her in-laws, and what happened there is described, with enormous charm, in Persian Adventure (Knopf, $3.50).

At first, the author thought she had arrived at holiday time. The numerous members of the Mehdevi household just sat around sipping tea, cracking watermelon seeds, nibbling sweetmeats, and receiving a stream of visitors. It took her some time to realize that this was the everyday routine of most wealthy Persians. She was crushed to discover that the dishes on which her food was served underwent a special decontamination process — being an infidel, she was unclean. Her husband’s father, Hajji Malek, the head of the clan, was treated as though he were the Shah-in-Shah. Every action was directed toward winning his favor or avoiding his displeasure. To earn his respect, his da ught er-in-law learned, she had to outbargain him over the dowry which she did not want, but which custom decreed he must pay her. He is an entrancing figure, the tyrannous old Hajji Malek, with his capricious moods, his resolute hypochondria, his sly sense of humor and infinite cunning; and he has been portrayed superlatively well.

Mrs Mehdevi visited Shaft by the Caspian and saw the misery of primitive Persia. She watched Mossadegh triumph over the opposition and rouse a mob to frenzy. She flew to Meshed, a Moslem shrine, and was remarried there according to Islamic law.

It is a long time since I have read so captivating a book of persona] experience. The author succeeds in being consistently amusing without slipping into the annoying formula which has become fashionable in lighthearted books of this kind: “I was bitten by bed bugs, the roof fell down, and I woke up with appendicitis: it couldn’t have been more fun.” What is more, Mrs. Sinclair Mehdevi is a highly perceptive observer, and she leaves you with the feeling you have grasped a thing or two about the psychology and mores of the puzzling Persians.

At fifty-two Charles Anderson — the hero of James Hilton’s new novel, Time and Time Again (Atlantic-Little, Brown, $3.75) — is No. 2 man in a British delegation at an international conference in Paris, at whose conclusion he has decided to retire. His life has not exactly been a success, nor has it been a failure. After a promising start in the Diplomatic Service, he forged ahead disappointingly slowly, and he has never been given a Legation. At Cambridge, he fell deeply in love with a girl not of his class and would have married her had not his father broken up t he relationship. But later Charles made a marriage that was not only eminently suitable but also extremely happy. Though his wife’s death in the Blitz has left a painful void in his life, it has not crushed him. A trim, handsome man, with suave manners and a pretty if erudite wit, he has in him enough of the stuffed shirt to have acquired the nickname “Stuffy Anderson” — but his colleagues use it with respect and affection.

Charles Anderson, in sum, is a thoroughly decent and pretty normal upper-class Englishman, whose only claim to distinction is that he is the greatest living authority on the Sanjak of Belar-Novo on the Macedonian frontier, and whose life contains little of the drama which helps to keep the wheels of fiction turning. And therein lies the special merit of Mr. Hilton’s novel. Out of the unspectacular career of a minor British diplomat, he has fashioned a quietly moving and continuously absorbing story.

The father-son relationship is the central motif, and we a re shown Charles’s difficulties with the eccentric, unstable Sir Havelock in counterpoint to Charles’s efforts to get to know his son, who has spent the war years in America. But what really matters is “Stuffy Anderson” himself. He is probably Mr. Hilton’s most solidly realized characterization — a figure with dignity, backbone, and pathos; curiously interesting in his just-above-averageness; and completely believable in his every thought and gesture, as he grows from a romantic but slightly stuffy undergraduate into a stuffy but slightly romantic middle-aged diplomat.

The Bridges at Toko-Ri (Random House, $2.50) by James A. Michener — a novella “commissioned” by Life magazine and published there in its entirety — brings me up against the tiresome business of exaggerated claims on the dust jacket. It is certainly no fault of the author that the publisher should label his work “one of the masterpieces of war literature.” But this kind of inflation does disservice to a book w hich invites unreserved applause for what it is: a vivid, stirring piece of semijournalistic fiction describing the heroism of the men of a naval task force operating off the Korean coast. Once the sign “masterpiece” has been slung up, one is nettled into saying that that is precisely what The Bridges at Toko-Ri is not, and never comes anywhere near to being.

Mr. Michener is at his best when he is closest to reportage. He brings to us the face and feel and complex facts of modern war with an immediacy and a precision I have never seen matched — the pilots moving into action in their grotesquely cumbersome accouterments; the catapulting of nine-ton jets from the wind-swept deck of the carrier; the intricate, dangerous mancuvering of the great ship and the split-second timing required to make possible a landing by the jets; the rescue by helicopter of a pilot who has bailed out into the freezing waters.

The story’s secondary characters have a sharp individuality: I can see Beer Barrel bringing in the jets with incredible skill; Admiral Tarrant, “battle-wizened” and austere; Mike Forney, the helicopter pilot, with his green-painted opera hat and Kelly green scarf. The hero, Brubaker, is less satisfactory. I am sure that there are hundreds of young men in Korea very like him, but it is not enough for a fictional character to have his prototypes in real life: he must have a life of his own, and Brubaker does not — I felt he had been put together according to specifications that would make him a representative type. And when Michener is spelling out his theme, the responsibilities of free men, the accents of an editorial creep into the story.

These failings do not prevent the novel from achieving its main objective with complete success. Michener has written an honest and a gripping tribute to sacrifices too easily forgotten, and he has pictured for us more tellingly than the camera the kind of war that the men on the carriers and the jets have been fighting in the stormy waters off Korea.

Galatea (Knopf, $3.00) by James M. Cain — the maestro of the heman, she-wolf school of fiction — reads like a dismal parody of James M. Cain by a hard-boiled hack writer who has wilted under a vegetarian diet. Health salads are the deus ex machina in this ludicrous triangular drama, in which the amorous hired hand pits his love against his loved one’s three hundred pounds of—I quote — “blubber,” while the mean husband piles on the calories and the ghost of John Wilkes Booth tries, wit h a total lack of success, to make the reader feel that something more sinister than avoirdupois is at stake.

Early on, a tree falls on the fat girl and she collapses in front of the hired hand “naked as the day she was born” — except for the normal amount of underwear. Right here, any Cain aficionado should realize that the master is pulling his punches. But I never dreamed I’d see a Cain hero go about the pursuit of happiness by chopping up raw vegetables for a wench so overnourished that he can’t even get his arms around her. There is, to be sure, a murder and a trial. But by this time our heroine is as svelte as Esther Williams and it’s obvious that the lady’s not for burning. Cain, henceforth thy middle name is Gayelord.