Books: Wickedest Man in the World

THE GREAT BEAST (316 pp.)—John Symonds—Roy ($4.50).

"I thought that I knew of every conceivable form of wickedness," said a judge to a London jury in summing up a libel case in 1934. "I thought that everything which was vicious and bad had been produced at one time or another before me. I have learned in this case that we can always learn something more ... I have never heard such dreadful, horrible, blasphemous and abominable stuff as that which has been produced by the man who describes himself to you as the greatest living...