Between 1937 and the outbreak of World...

Between 1937 and the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Graham Greene kept a fragmentary “commonplace book” and diary in which he recorded the odds and ends of life in London in those anxious years: “Verses, literary gossip, bizarre crimes and divorces wrenched from newspapers, the sickness of my children . . . which seemed more to be feared than the voice of Hitler ranting on the radio . . . and then suddenly the digging of trenches on Clapham Common outside our windows, the distribution of gas masks, the evacuation of children--all that period summed up in Stephen Spender’s poem written then: ‘We who live under the shadow of a war,/What can we do that matters?’ ”

Excerpts from Greene’s diary, selected by the author himself, appear as “While Waiting for a War” in GRANTA 17 (Penguin: $6.95), the latest edition of the distinguished English literary journal that is only now available in the United States in a quality paperback format. It’s an all-too-brief but wholly fascinating glimpse into the workings of the writer’s mind--and the preoccupations of a class and a culture that were slipping helplessly toward catastrophe. After a screening of film tests for “The Green Cockatoo,” Greene is excited and pleased at “hearing one’s own dialogue on the screen for the first time,” but vows “to remove every trace of American influence;” he ponders a newspaper advertisement for prophylactics, a letter to the editor about corsets, the variety of “pornographic” American magazines available in England; he quotes Walt Whitman, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Tom Paine (“Eloquence is the varnish of falsehood; truth has none . . .”); and he preserves a clipping, reproduced in facsimile, of his 1937 review of “Wee Willie Winkie”: “Miss Shirley Temple . . . has peculiar interest: Infancy with her is a disguise, her appeal is more secret and more adult.”

Also featured in the book-length “GRANTA 17” is an extract from “They: Stalin’s Polish Elite” by the Polish journalist Teresa Toranska, a collection of interviews with purged party leaders which was published clandestinely in Poland last year, as well as contributions from a truly cosmopolitan assortment of writers.

Another lion of the English literati is celebrated in Bertrand Russell on God and Religion, edited by Al Seckel (Prometheus: $12.95), an anthology of Russell’s essays on the varieties of faith, and the lack of it, in his times. We are reminded that Russell, who may be best remembered for his early leadership of the contemporary nuclear disarmament movement, “began thinking about philosophical questions at the age of fifteen”--in 1888! His famous confession of faith in pure reason, “Why I Am Not a Christian,” was an address first delivered in 1927: “The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms,” he proclaimed. “It is a conception quite unworthy of free men.” Indeed, the sheer elegance of Lord Russell’s language, the strict logic of his argument, and the extremely civilized tone of even his most ardent rhetoric all seem almost antique. Still, “On God and Religion” is a classic not only because of its place in the history of ideas, or its roots in the tradition of Western literature and philosophy, but also because the truths that it offers are truly timeless; Russell could have been writing for today’s op-ed page when he observed that “the qualities most needed are charity and tolerance, not some form of fanatical faith such as is offered us by the various rampant isms.”

I am surprised that we did not see The March to Victory: A Guide to World War II Battles and Battlefields (Harper & Row: $9.95; also available in hardcover, $18.95) last year, when the world was remembering the end of World War II and our President was touring historic sites from Normandy to Bitburg. Authors John T. Bookman and Stephen T. Powers have devised a kind of pilgrimage through the European Theater of Operations, with well-documented and well-described stops at the places where the war was fought and won: London and the Battle of Britain, the Normandy Invasion, the break-out across France, the ill-fated flanking maneuver in Holland, the Battle of the Bulge, the crossing of the Rhine and the defeat of Nazi Germany. “The March of Victory” is both a guidebook and an intimate work of history; we are provided with a battle map of the Huertgen Forest, for example, as well as a contemporary street map of the strategic city of Aachen, and we are told where to find the Quellenhof Hotel, which served as Nazi headquarters. But I must wonder why “The March of Victory” ignores the liberation of Nazi concentration camps by the Allies: Why so much attention to Aachen, but no mention of Dachau?

The Perfect London Walk, by celebrity film critic Roger Ebert and the mentor of his freshman year at the University of Illinois, English professor Daniel Curley (Andrews, McMeel & Parker: $8.95), is a personal obsession and a private tradition reduced to print--Ebert and Curley painstakingly lead the reader on just one of an infinite number of treks through literary and historic London, but one that the authors praise as the essential London ramble. “It is ritual,” writes Ebert. “I have walked it in snow and sleet, in rain and cold, in burning hot drought, and, most often, on perfect spring or autumn days.” The Ebert-Curley variant begins at Hampstead Heath, mounts Parliament Hill, pauses at various sites and landmarks associated with Johnson, Keats, Orwell, Dickens and others, and includes opportunities for taking refreshment at various public houses before concluding at Highgate Cemetery.