1 The Trial of Craig and Bentley in the ‘Notable British Trials Series’ (Hodge, 15s.) provides some sad evidence. Both boys were of respectable families, both were virtually illiterate and both showed a callousness and determination in crime which, while fortunately rare in the tragedy of its results, is yet characteristic enough of many boys sentenced to Borstal. As Craig's counsel put it at the trial, ‘Christopher Craig has become a symbol of wayward youth; the nation's uneasiness and anxiety about the state of their youth have become focused upon him’. Unfortunately the special circumstances of this trial for murder unleashed a wave of sensational and ill‐informed generalizations about juvenile crime, and as usual the popular press, under the guise of moral indignation, pandered to the morbid curiosity which revels in the effect of a crime but cares nothing about its true causes.

2 Crime and the Services, by John Spencer (Routledge, 28s.) is a most valuable sociological study, both as to method and as to the conclusions drawn. Dr Spencer's primary concern is with the influence that Service life has on criminal behaviour, and his case‐histories are for the most part of ex‐Service convicts interviewed in prisons and Borstals. But much of what he says has its relevance to the more general problem of the influence of service in the Armed Forces on potential criminals. Such matters as the habit of forming gangs, the effect of desertion and the difficulty of resuming social contacts in the local community when the period of conscription is over, are important determinants of social behaviour. Dr Spencer's study is of the greatest importance, and, as Dr Hermann Mannheim points out in his introduction, should draw attention to a social grouping which, after the family and the school, is becoming dominant in the national life.