Robert Lacey

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has emerged as a curiosity for the western world ever since it got the indus¬trialized economies over a barrel. For centuries the nomadic tribes in that obscure peninsula were left to settle scores among themselves. The house of Al Saud, which even¬tually established its ascen¬dancy through the epic efforts of the redoubtable Abdul Aziz, compelled recognition of his control of the greater part of the land mass by the great powers, with the Soviet Union, ironically enough, leading the way.


Reviewed by: Kamalesh Sharma
Maj. Gen. Niranjan Prasad

They sell their lives as dearly in peace as they should do in war—so the plaint of one reviewer in the years after the Second World War, when the generals on the Allied side flooded the market with memoirs written by or for them, proving how each of them had outwitted all others and would, if permitted, have won the war single-handed.


Reviewed by: Sarvepalli Gopal
Zdzislaw Reszelewski

An anthology of modern Polish poetry in English trans¬lation should appropriately be reviewed by one who knows both Polish and English. I do not know Polish, and this excludes from the scope of this review one of the important tasks of reviewing a literary work in translation. The ap¬preciation of how far the translator has succeeded in conveying the mood, music and meaning of the original to the translated version is thus inevitably absent.


Reviewed by: Mukesh Vatsyayan
Richard A. Andretta

Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tem¬pest have more features in common than any other group of Shakespeare’s plays. They were written in succession to¬wards the end of his life, and there is a persistent belief that The Tempest was intended to be the author’s farewell to the theatre (although he spoilt this neat symmetry between-art and life by going on to write Henry VIII).


Reviewed by: Rajiva Verma
T.R.S. Sharma

Since Lionel Trilling raised the issue of Robert Frost’s ‘terrifying universe,’ the question of the poet’s poetic style as a means of articulat¬ing his complex vision has received profounder critical attention. T.R.S. Sharma’s critical work is an attempt to study the stylistic features of Frost’s poetry such as metony¬my, metaphor and synecdoche, and to explore their relation with syntax and other linguis¬tic correlatives.


Reviewed by: Vasant A. Shahane