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TO HAVE HER NAME PERPETUATED in the cocktail bar of a plush modern South African hotel may seem an odd fate for an eighteenth‐century Scottish poetess. You may not even be able to guess her identity. For there are certainly not many women's names to be found in the pages of Scottish literature before the twentieth century, and none in retrospect comparable in stature with George Eliot, Elizabeth Browning, Jane Austen or the Brontes south of the border.

SAILORS ARE GREAT READERS, and every year the Ministry of Defence (R.N.) spends some £30,000 on the purchase of books for the officers and men of the Royal Navy. These are not haphazard collections thrown together from those available. Nearly 30 per cent of the money goes on general fiction, and 25 per cent on adventure stories, detective yarns and thrillers. Nine per cent is spent on science fiction, some 7 per cent each on sea stories, factual and fictional history books, and spy and war stories. Biographies and autobiographies account for 6 per cent, and the rest is made up of humorous stories and Westerns.