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The Desert and the Stars by Flora Armitage (Holt, $4.00) is not likely to be the last word on T. E. Lawrence, for he draws commentators as honey draws flies, but it is a book that has long been needed. Miss Armitage has done something unprecedented in writing a straightforward, unhysterical biography of a man who has been subjected to an inordinate amount of romantic worship on the one hand and of malice on the other. Lawrence of Arabia as she describes him is a far livelier figure than either the conscious fraud envisioned by his enemies or that deplorable melange of Galahad, Napoleon, and Richard Burton concocted by his Jess discreet friends.

Perhaps because of Lawrence’s family background (he was illegitimate, one of five sons born to a couple who would have passed for models of uprightness and piety if circumstances hadn’t prevented them from ever getting married) the early section of the book is rather short on precise detail. The boys seem to have been raised as a small masculine club, unacquainted with any woman but their mother, who remains the only real authority on Lawrence’s childhood. It is reported as uneventful, but something must have happened, for shortly after entering Oxford Lawrence ran off and enlisted in the Royal Artillery, from which he was retrieved, somewhat the worse for wear, by his father. Miss Armitage has not been able to discover any definite explanation for this freak.

Once the scene shifts to the Middle East there can be no complaint about shortage of facts or witnesses. From his own letters and the memories of his colleagues comes a vivid picture of the young archaeologist and traveler, mischievous, hard-working, curious, and adaptable.

Since Lawrence’s own account of his service in the First World War stands plain for all to read in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Miss Armitage wisely has summarized his activities as leader, or partial leader, of the Arab revolt against the Turks. Sorting through the testimony of his military superiors, she concludes that he was a good guerrilla commander who would never have got by as a general in more formal warfare, and that he did exactly what he was ordered to do in Arabia, which was to lure off a large section of the Turkish army and keep it out of the way of the British advance.

By the end of the war, Lawrence and the Arabian campaign had caught the eye of the press. Overenthusiastic journalism established him as one of the great romantic figures of his time, a satisfactorily picturesque and mysterious hero in a war which was, by and large, sadly devoid of heroes in the grand old style. While much flamboyant dithering went on in print, Lawrence was trying, unsuccessfully, to forward the cause of his Arab friends at the peace conference. He had drifted into a very uncomfortable state of mind, alternately annoyed and fascinated by his public character, discouraged by the difficulties of the book he was trying to write, furious over what he considered the betrayal of the Arabs.

On the verge of mental and physical collapse, he fell back on his earlier resource in time of crisis and enlisted in the Royal Air Force. It is wryly amusing to discover that the RAF was not pleased, refused to put up with his casual alias, and that ultimately higher powers had to browbeat the recruiting office into looking the other way while Colonel Lawrence of Arabia signed on as John Hume Ross.

The rest of his life was a repetitive pattern of aliases, changes of service, dodgings of the press, writings of memoirs, and losings of manuscripts. If he didn’t lose a manuscript, he did his best to get it published in a limited edition at an astronomical price. This is a very curious state of mind for an author, and Miss Armitage explores it, and Lawrence’s other evasions, with ingenuity. She also has a great deal of information on the work he actually did in the Air Force, which was, in the later stages, decidedly valuable. Far from being an anticlimax, the post-Arabian years are as interesting as anything in the book.

There can be no final answer to any life, and if The Desert and the Stars doesn’t succeed in explaining Lawrence it is hardly surprising. Plenty of clues pile up, however, and the reader is at liberty to choose among them. Perhaps the most persistent clue of all is the number of what are generally considered childish, or rather boyish, traits in Lawrence. The love of dressing up and assuming strange identities, the tendency to play every scene to the hilt with no regard for consequences, the impish practical jokes, the preference for an organized masculine society, the inability to get on with women — he kept them all to the end. Highly intelligent, subtle, resourceful in many respects he certainly was. Can it be that the heart of the mystery was, after all, Peter Pan?

In Hogarth’s Progress (Viking, $6.50), Peter Quennell has written the only comprehensive biography in more than fifty years of the man Whistler called “the greatest of English painters,” and incidentally he has re-created eighteenth-century London in masterly fashion.

Hogarth is not an easy subject for a biographer. Mr. Quennell has accomplished something of a tour do force in arousing irresistible interest in a man of whose private life and character very little is definitely known, for Hogarth was neither a letter writer nor a journal keeper, and many of his closest associates were equally innocent of this useful vice.

The material from which Mr. Quennell has had to work consists largely of what might be called Hogarth’s official utterances. These are lively stuff, however, for Hogarth, the son of an unsuccessful schoolmaster, brought up in a semi-slum and to a considerable extent self-trained as an artist, had firm views about his own profession and they didn’t square with the fashionable theories of his day. He waged a lifelong battle, with cartoons, pamphlets, and conversation, against the official taste of his time, which decreed, to Hogarth’s fury, that a bad painter is automatically better than a good painter provided only that the bad painter is (a) Italian and (h) dead. Tracing the ramifications of this aesthetic row, Mr. Quennell explores the quarrels and cabals of the artistic set, just as absurdly amusing then as they are today.

Small, peppery, tactless, with a weakness for roughhouse comedy and an insatiable interest in humanity’s more picturesque follies, Hogarth painted his way to fame and a moderate fortune, as well as to an acquaintance that included, counting enemies as well as friends, practically everybody. Mr. Quennell makes full use of every connection. In discussing the background of Hogarth’s style, he throws in a crisp vignette of Sir Christopher Wren and a dryly comic explanation of the interlocking of dirty politics and royal taste that caused the great architect’s downfall. Hogarth’s friendship with Garrick is the excuse for a portrait of that terrifying beauty, Peg Woffington; alongside the description of The Harlot’s Progress comes a short, brilliant analysis of John Gay, whose Beggar’s Opera may have been the final incentive to Hogarth’s scheme of a series of dramatically composed pictures illustrating a particular type of contemporary misbehavior. The Harlot, The Rake, and the unhappy couple of Marriage à la Mode made Hogarth the most popular artist of his day, but he remained suspect at court to the end, and his book expounding aesthetic theory was treated as a sort of comic outrage. In fact, Hogarth in his later years was groping toward impressionism, but his enemies were right in claiming that what he wrote had little connection with what he painted.

The reception of his book rather depressed the painter, who seems to have been naïvely surprised that critics and connoisseurs he had lampooned for years took the opportunity to revenge themselves. But though depressed, he was not pacified. He died in the midst of a particularly venomous political scuffle, an event which inspired Dr. Johnson to an epitaph which was, for the Great Cham, remarkably compressed and even more remarkably poetic: —

Wit and scholar, Peter Quennell is the author of Byron in Italy, John Ruskin, and Caroline of England, as well as a number of critical pieces and historical studies. Hogarth’s Progress is as lively and learned as the best of Mr. Quennell’s work, and generously illustrated with reproductions of the best of Hogarth’s.

In Brooks Adams: American Prophet (Knopf, $6.00), Arthur F. Beringause has produced a lush example of the detached or scholarly biography as opposed to the affectionate labors of Miss Armitage and Mr. Quennell. It is clear that Mr. Beringause cares nothing at all for his subject as a person (it must be granted that few people have ever claimed Brooks Adams was a lovable man) and equally clear that he has plowed through the vast hoard of Adams papers with all the glee of Long John Silver loose in Fort Knox. What interests him is the development of Adams’s theory of history.

Since Adams propounded this in all he ever wrote and debated the writing in advance in letters to his brother Henry, Mr. Beringause has been able to work out the origin and elements of the system with great clarity. Indeed, half the practical basis of this biography is Henry’s aversion to dealing with Brooks in the flesh. He preferred his younger brother on paper and was quite capable of discovering urgent business in Paris if he got wind of Brooks’s intention to visit him in Washington.

Brooks’s theory, in outrageously simplified form, was that national power depends on a concentration of gold, which in turn depends on control of all major trade routes. The next step, logical but uncivil, was to argue that the United States, having already wrested considerable control of gold from England, should make war on everyone in sight in order to get control of trade routes as well and set up as the greatest world power for years to come. Working around the edges of this system, Adams accurately foresaw the two World Wars, the weakening of the British Empire, the emergence of Russia as a great power, and the struggle for control of Asia.

Nobody loves Cassandra, especially if there’s reason to think she’s right. Brooks Adams longed to be a power in politics, but except for a short period of glory as behind-the-scenes adviser to Theodore Roosevelt, he was heard with respect and shunted tactfully out of the way. There is probably more of a story to this side of Adams’s career than Mr. Beringause reveals. He has been so absorbed by what Brooks wrote that he has slighted what he did, and he lacks the gift of making the times in which he lived and the forces that affected society and the man’s own character emerge clearly. The result is not so much a biography as the history of an idea pursued with monumental conscientiousness in a businesslike prose which would be rather more readable if the author had looked into the difference between to persuade and to convince.

Gontran de Poncins, author of Kabloona and other books of travel and adventure, has rather surprisingly produced a volume of reminiscence which can best be described as a French Life with Father. Father Sets the Pace (Doubleday, $3.75) is less deliberately funny than the Day stories, and more honest about the trials besetting the offspring of an exceptionally gaudy parent, but it has the same undertone of exasperated affection and the same mixture of admiration and thank-heaventhat’s-over relief.

Father was a work of art and, since he had created the masterpiece himself, nobody appreciated it more than he did. (He was a count, too, but that was an act of God and impressed him less.) Dressing involved two hours of anguished struggle and left the valet prostrate in a room that looked like a battlefield. Traveling required a mountain of luggage because “the removal of even a bootjack was like removing the cornerstone of a building.” A dinner was a theatrical production and a shooting party became an epic.

Horses were the only serious subject. Father attended Mass dutifully but he worshiped the Horse. Aside from his peculiar faith, the count’s whole purpose in life was to enjoy himself, and he was eager to have his wife and son enjoy themselves too, provided only that they would do it his way. Unfortunately, young Gontran couldn’t stick on a horse and his mother had so little interest in clothes that her husband once told her, “The King of England ... is ATTIRED. I am DRESSED. You are merely COVERED!” The countess fainted on the spot.

The book is full of gay anecdote, bustle, parties, and luxury, but under all the Edwardian glitter runs the conflict between the count and countess, who were certainly as ill-assorted a couple as ever made the mistake of marrying. He wanted the best of everything. She, confronted with twice as much fruit as the company could possibly eat, would search out the one spotted pear, crying triumphantly, “Here’s one that’s going to spoil,” and eat it.

Mr. de Poncins describes his parents and their life with very little nostalgia but with humor, affection, and appreciation for that formal, elegant world which, if it was more rigid than ours in some matters, was also, in many respects, kinder to individual eccentricity.

Elleston Trevor’sThe Big Pickup (Macmillan, $3.00) is, in the author’s own words, “a soldier’s-eye view of Dunkirk,” covering not only the rescue of the British Expeditionary Force from that terrible beach but the confused, desperate, stubborn endurance that brought so many men there to be rescued.

Mr. Trevor begins with Corporal Binns face down in a hole and counting the screams of German dive bombers somewhere over his head. He and two other men have lost their unit. The rest of the book is a long walk through chaos, on which Binns and his colleagues guess at their route, scrounge food, dodge Germans, join a convoy which is bombed to fragments, salvage a magnificent car and run it until it falls apart, push their way through crowds of refugees on the roads or flounder across country, hungry, bewildered, ragged, and wounded but always going on.

This picaresque scheme allows the author to introduce a great variety of episodes, from an improvised field hospital to a hideous drunken party in an inn cellar, and he makes the most of it. The book is so packed with incident that it is hardly safe to skip a sentence; three new characters and an air raid can slip by while you do it.

The men are not portrayed with any great subtlety, but they are plausible and sufficiently characterized to stand apart from each other. Given the scheme of the book, that’s enough. Binns is the pivot, and Binns gradually establishes himself as a formidable fellow, a relative of Conrad’s Captain MacWhirr. He has the same stolid resolution and limited imagination, a combination that makes him a hero without Binns having the least suspicion of it.

Vivid, horrifying, and lightning fast, The Big Pick-up is one of the more impressive recent novels about the Second World War.

The Tontine (Doubleday, $5.95), Thomas B. Costain’s outsize panorama of nineteenth-century England, is one of those historical novels that read as if they were telling a lot about a period and prove in the end to have told very little. It follows the fortunes of three families from Waterloo nearly to the end of the century, concentrating on the rise and fall of a great mercantile dynasty with excursions into labor conditions on the side.

This is a perfectly good subject for a novel, but since Mr. Costain has I a habit of keeping pertinent details of the business side of his plot to himself, and slurs merrily over all but the most obvious changes in manners, dress, and law, the novel produces a curious impression of a world standing still for seventy years. Characters, all of them standard types, are repeated from one generation to the next. Conversation is pretty much all the same. The careful introduction of an occasional bit of period slang is overbalanced by the appearance of modern usages in the eighteen-twenties, Americanisms in English conversations, and paraphrases of poets who, if born at all, were in diapers at the time Mr. Costain’s characters refer to them.

So much hard work and knowledge have gone into The Tontine that one can only regret the author’s evident decision to convert the ideas and methods of the nineteenth century into comfortable modern stereotypes rather than ask modern readers to make an effort toward understanding the period as it really was.

The Notebooks of Major Thompson (Knopf, $2.95) is a most amusing little book about the vagaries of the French, but explaining its exact nature is as bad as explaining a family joke. The author is Pierre Daninos, a Frenchman. For his assault on his own countrymen, he has assumed the character of Thompson, Major Hon. William Marmaduke, D.S.O. (1943), C.S.I. (1934), O.B.E. (1931). b. Oct. 8, 1902. 4th s. of 4th Earl Strawforness, veteran of a long career in various British possessions including, naturally, India. The major is now living in France with his second wife (she’s French) and has been moved to explain his affection for and qualified admiration of the natives. In their own language, at that. His French collaborator, Mr. Daninos, has added footnotes wistfully explaining his inability to set the major straight on certain points or tartly pointing out related peculiarities of the British.

This elaborate bit of play-acting, which was a roaring success in France, has now been translated into English, thereby achieving the complication of a hall of mirrors.

The major whacks about, him gaily. “The French are convinced that their country wishes no one any harm. The English are condescending, the Americans bossy, the Germans sadistic, the Italians incomprehensible, the Russians impenetrable, the Swiss Swiss. But the French are nice. Other people are horrid to them.”So much for international relations. As for domestic affairs, “France is divided into forty-three million Frenchmen.”

Getting down to more individual matters, the major discusses French salons, the habit of lingering on the doorstep for two more hours of conversation, traveling in order to announce that things are better at home. Mr. Daninos, scuttling along the bottom of the pages, mentions English tea, colonial policy, and the lethal silence of English cars and conversations.

Any reader who has begun to suspect that the French are much like the rest of us is quite right. The major has hit upon a number of normal minor follies in their French form. Down among the small type, Mr. Daninos potshoots at the English form of the same things. The American reader, laughing at both, is bound to find that he’s laughing at himself.

Not many plays stand up well to private reading, but those of Sean O’Casey always have, and The Bishop’s Bonfire (Macmillan, $3.00) is no exception. Mr. O’Casey, never a lover of any status quo, has poured into this savagely comic play all his hatred of what he considers the cowardly, materialistic, phony-pious provincialism of present-day Ireland.

With the exception of an urbane priest, a tough old rhymer left over from an earlier day, and a girl in love, all his characters are timid, prissy, sanctimonious, money-mad, vulgarly ostentatious, bullying, or puritanical. Councillor Reiligan, whose preparations to entertain an Irish-American bishop are the base of the plot, actually manages to be most of these things at once. These people ought to be revolting, and to some extent they are, but the vitality of their actions and their fireworks dialogue makes them good company in spite of themselves. Mr. O’Casey will commit any outrage on a character short of giving him dull lines. Reiligan is a dreadful man, but when he denounces his clumsy henchmen as “a bunch of destituted owls,” a heart of stone would warm to him.

At bottom, The Bishop’s Bonfire is a bitter and very nearly hopeless play, for Mr. O’Casey believes that all life in Ireland is being crushed by greed for things, fear of the church, and neurotic chastity. He has managed to convey all the force of this grim view without sacrificing a yard in the field of comic eloquence. It is an amazing achievement.

Dudley Fitts, who last year brought out a brilliant translation of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, has done it again with The Frogs (Harcourt, Brace, $4.00). The shrewd, bawdy, uproariously funny classic comes from his hands as rib-shattering as ever and as fresh as if it were two days old instead of two thousand odd years.

On the excuse that Aristophanes, writing a satire on dramatic poets, peppered his play with quotations well known to his audience, Mr. Fitts has contrived hilariously unexpected echoes of Keats, Eliot, Shakespeare, and Pound, not to mention parodies of several all too recognizable schools of avant-garde versifiers. The translation may be a bit free at times, but the devastation is well worth it. Notes, references, and other scholarly paraphernalia are tucked away in the back of the book, and some of the information lurking there is almost as funny as the play.

There have been so many reminiscences of spies, counterspies, commandos, and fifth columnists operating in the Second World War that it sometimes seems that every man who volunteered for secret service must have lugged a typewriter with him into action. Most of these books are interesting. A few are downright marvelous. Commando Extraordinary (Putnam, $3.75) is one of the few, by long odds the best in this field since that great tale of how the British kidnaped the German commander in Crete.

Otto Skorzeny has not written his own story. A London editor, Charles Foley, located him in Spain and persuaded him to talk. Once he started, the “most dangerous man in Germany” told everything in the hope of disowning a title of which he never did think much. The story is so good, so surprising, so full of absurd contretemps and old-fashioned derring-do, that one would be inclined to forgive Skorzeny even if he had been the most dangerous man in Germany, which is a very doubtful charge anyway.

Skorzeny became Hitler’s special effects expert rather late in the game, for it wasn’t until the British had set them an example in ambush and abduction that it occurred to the Germans that the snatch and the killing affray still have their uses in war. At least this is Skorzeny’s story. But although Hitler started late, he found in Skorzeny a man who more than made up for lost time, a very d’Artagnan for ingenuity and wily enterprise. This large, tough, amiable Austrian, who was in no sense a professional soldier, dropped out of the sky to whisk Mussolini out of prison and away into Axis hands. He stagemanaged an almost bloodless coup d’état which kept the wavering Hungarian government hitched to Berlin’s apron strings. During Germany’s last desperate offensive in the winter of 1944, his men were out in American uniform spreading what confusion they could behind Allied lines. It was this affair that led to the great panic over a supposed German plot to murder General Eisenhower. Skorzeny blandly insists that no such plot ever existed, and there is nobody around now who can contradict him.

The mere recital of Skorzeny’s exploits would be irresistible, but Mr. Foley has managed much more than that. The people Skorzeny dealt with come to life in sharp little vignettes. The reasoning behind his fantastic maneuvers is carefully explained. The book is crammed with details about military red tape and how to cut it, high-brass idiocy (Skorzeny clearly still holds a grudge against the General Staff for obstructing what the Staff considered his half-baked, half-amateur, and wholly unmilitary projects), mad plans proposed by Nazi prima donnas and how to shelve them, and the confusion in Berlin after the attempt to assassinate Hitler. During this fracas, Skorzeny, who was a nobody in strict military terms, found himself running the war office. He was the only man around who thought “What should be done?” rather than “What have I the authority to do?”

Alongside Skorzeny’s adventures runs serious speculation by Mr. Foley, Skorzeny, and a number of British and American authorities on the exact military value of the kind of unorthodox actions that he conducted. They all conclude that, a man of Skorzeny’s type, given plenty of material and a fairly free hand, could create havoc out of all proportion to the scale of his operations. Perhaps these gentlemen overestimate the possibilities of this kind of thing, but nobody could overestimate its interest.