The Crimson Bookshelf

THIS story of "Retreat from Glory", Lockhart's sequel to his famed "British Agent," is not quite as good as that original opus for the simple reason that the material is not as good. In this tale of travel and experience after the war, Lockhart takes us on his semi-official banking and diplomatic mission to East-central Europe.

Mr. Lockhart is personally as fascinating as ever: humorous, egotistically amusing, naively entertaining. But he does not have the background to work with or the experiences to tell that made his first story one of the best-seller nonfiction books of the year. "Retreat from Glory" gives the chaotic situation of unrest in central Europe just after the war. With an eye to details, he describes the elegant British minister, Sir George Clerk: "Alongside the squat khaki-and-blue-trousered figures of the Czech and French generals he looked like a thoroughbred in a field of hacks." Mr. Lockhart unconsciously appears to recognize in his present book the lack of drama that colored his last as he admits "In Russia I had witnessed a proletarian revolution. It had been everything that individual likes and dislikes may choose to call it. But it had been on the grand scale. It had not been petty. Here I was assisting in a petit-bourgeois revolution with all the pretentiousness and some of the ridiculousness inseparable from every petit-bourgeois revolution."

Lockhart's story of Dalmatian intrigue is as worth reading as the average movie is worth seeing. Yet this reviewer is inclined to think that Bruce Lockhart wrote his "Return from Glory" with one eye on the link-well and the other on the publisher's check.