Richard Aldington (1892-1962) is today one of the lesser-read poets of WW1. His often oblique allusions, sensuous frankness and predominant use of free verse make a body of poetry very different from the standard pieces encountered in classrooms and mainstream anthologies.

Excepting the omission of a few tangential works, Michael Copp's edition brings together all the poems in which Aldington commented on the war. Welcome finds include such moving love poems as "Reverie" (addressed to Aldington's wife, the poet H.D.), sharp vignettes like "Bombardment", and poems such as "A Village" in which small beauties provide the salve for wartime misery. Aldington's preoccupations throughout his literary career - love, suffering, stoicism, and a pagan reverence for the natural world - are clearly shown. Mr Copp's full introduction furthermore provides a useful synthesis of recent scholarship on Aldington, his war writings and his relationship to Imagism.

The book as a whole stands as a quality tribute and important re-introduction to a strangely neglected writer. Highly recommended.

This edition of Oscar Wilde's work - in addition to its inclusion of much personal correspondence - is a fascinating look at the author and, notably, his personal travails.

The novel, of course, and the plays are classics, but I found the letters to be a juicy narrative all their own. The twists and turns of his doomed affair with Lord Alfred Douglas, affectionately called "Bosie" in touching - and bitter - love notes from prison, are here to peruse. Reading them, you get a sense of Wilde's personal feelings at the time of his famed trial and arrest for sodomy, his anguish at losing Bosie and going to jail. It's fascinating, juicy stuff - made all the more touching by the fact that it all occurred without shame, in plain view, over 100 years ago.

Wilde's a great character, a great author, a good role model for gay life and a hysterical wit. And this book is a must.

Many people have seen one of several movie productions of this book and assumed that it is a modern story that has taken the 18th century as its setting. In fact, the book was written at that time, and it provides a shocking, thrilling, sexy window into the lives of the french aristocracy. It is a thing of beauty. The exploits of the central characters make your average daytime soap opera look tame, and it is all done with a cunning and an evil grace that went out of style with the french revolution. Language is used as an aphrodesiac, a lever, and occasionally a cudgel, and since the book takes the form of the published letters of the main characters we hear it straight from the pens of those involved. "Les Liasons Dangereuses" will make you mourn the invention of the telephone. Such skill with the written word! The double meaning was king, with muddied intentions as its queen. Read this book: you really must. If you love language it will become a favorite of yours, just as it did for me.

Along with L'Assommoir by Zola and Journey to the End of the Night by Celine, Choderlos de Laclos's masterpiece ranks as one of my favorite books of all time. To fully appreciate the genius of the letter writing form,one must understand that the libertine novels of the 18th century all utilized this format. Laclos admittedly set out to write a book that would depart from other works of the century to leave a dramatic imprint on the world, and he succeeded. While written in the same lingusitic and seductive style of a libertine novel, Laclos transforms the limited and mundane scope of the libertine world into a riveting classic. Each character reflects a different conception of "love" and how the libertine world can go awry when true sentiment is confused with lust. La Marquise de Merteuil reflects the purest degree of libertinage. In perhaps the most spellbinding of all the letters, she explains to Valmont her duplictious conduct after her husband's death to obtain her reputation among men and place herself at the forefront of society's attention. In contrast, Mlle. de Tourvel is the epitome of sentimental love, to the point that she can become physically ill if it is not reciprocated. Clearly what separates this work from other romance novels of the 18th century, elevating it to the level of other world masterpieces, is the character of Valmont. He is the heart and soul of this novel in every way possible. One one hand, Valmont is extremely self-assured in his ways, when describing his calculating, rational strategy in courting naive young ladies. On the other hand, he refuses to accept the reality evidenced by his relationship with Mme. de Tourvel that he is not the manipulative libertine that he, and society, consider him to be. The deep struggle within Valmont between his true feelings and his vanity in preserving his reputation of libertinage is perhaps the most compelling storyline in the novel- because it is physcological and under the surface. At this level, Les Liaisons Dangereuses is often compared to "Crime and Punishment". les Liaisons is more subtle in its physcological dimension in that the reader must form her own conclusions about Valmont's physchosis whereas Raskelnikov's mental state is at the heart of the prose. If I have not convinved everyone yet to go ahead and experience the magic of Laclos (who fortuneatley survived the Terror), then I have failed in my task...

When I read Choderlos de Laclos' 1782 novel, "Les Liaisons Dangereuses" (which retains its French title in the 1961 English translation by P W K Stone), I found myself amazed and thrilled by its absolute excellence of execution. Its energy and spirit, and the seductive and machiavellian - perhaps even diabolical - undertones which whisper throughout the work, urge the reader ever onwards in the best page-turning tradition. It is possibly not for nothing that the book itself was eventually decreed 'dangerous' by French officials a full 42 years after it first appeared, long after it might have been expected to have lost its ability to shock. Even if you have seen the films "Dangerous Liaisons" (dir. Steven Frears) or "Valmont" (dir. Milos Forman) based on the book - and whether or not you liked them - this is an outstandingly good novel which is beautifully served by the precise and graceful prose of its translator, whose subtle range of diction manages to convey the tones and tempers of the characters most convincingly. The story's chief virtues - a compelling narrative drive, and a skill in characterisation which permit some superbly-observed insights - easily withstand comparison with the screen versions; even today, when we are so fully exposed to the diverse secrets of the psychiatrist's confessional and the details of the all world's vicissitudes and miseries, it would be hard to improve on their portrayal here in print.

The book succeeds so well for many reasons. Some of its appeal to a sophisticated (or at least blasé) modern audience is, I believe, the multi-layered cynicism of its vainglorious but not unattractive main characters and rivals, the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte (viscount) de Valmont, a reminder that profound deceit is not the sole prerogative of the post-industrial era. Part of the reader's amusement is to observe how their egotism - by far the most easily-wounded of their sensibilities - is also an exercise in the deception of themselves as well as of all those with whom they have dealings. Equally, their wily scheming and duplicity simultaneously appal the reader while also appealing to any secret desire he might himself harbour to exercise his own will with equal freedom and with equal heedlessness of conscience or consequences, thus planting a distinct ambivalence in his or her breast. This effect is augmented by the shifting first-person narrative, a device which gives the voices of its protagonists an intimate (and often touching) immediacy and multiplies the scope for irony by giving the reader a consistently better view than the characters, to which the skilful interweaving of the sub-plots also contributes. I should mention that the novel is written entirely as a sequence of letters. This format was common in the 18th century when the book was written, but its relative rarity in modern fiction makes its appearance today refreshing. That it is overtly concerned with the sexual seduction of the weak by the strong partially disguises the fact that it is also a philosophical novel whose themes would easily form the subject of more general discussion. As a depiction of the relations between individual human beings, it is, to be sure, a study of calculating spiritual emptiness, but one which does not shy from laying bare the catastrophic consequences of the conspirators on their victims, just as the report of a war correspondent might describe in detail the horror of a bomb explosion in a hospital. "Les Liaisons Dangereuses" not only contains plenty of anguish on the part of its characters and an affecting deathbed scene, but the reader's own emotions are made to oscillate intensely throughout from amusement to arousal, from curiosity to incredulity, from admiration to dismay... all thanks to the superb manipulation of Laclos, whose mastery of both narrative and reader is absolute and, perhaps, somewhat unsettling. (But how I wish he had written more!)

Written in response to widespread condemnation of the sexuality and libertine lifestyles presented in his books, Apocalypse was the final attempt by D. H. Lawrence to make himself understood. The modern reader will probably detect a full throttle blitz against the puritanical deacons of the Church of England and his establishment tormentors. Launched from the most contentious and abstruse of the Bible's books, Revelations, Lawrence levels his antipathy at a rigid, superficially moral, life denying exposition of Christian thought. He argues that the confining nature of living the 'good' life in expectation of reward in Heaven cuts to the root of an immensely rich potential for experience and passion presented in the world. He continuously falls back on opaque codices-- of arcane civilizations that he states more fully explored the metaphysical realm. Lawrence divines a heroic age where apparent creation and destiny were seen as integral and complete. Robert Graves's 'The White Goddess' comprehensively analyzes the same mythological, magical architecture, but Lawrence uses it in a much more targeted and critical way.

Lawrence saw the aesthetic brilliance of Revelations as a bridge to a more mysterious, immediate, compelling theology. At the same time he condemns the apocalyptic churches who interpret the book as the evocation of Hell and Judgement, rather than in its potent poetic symbolism. He goes so far as to accuse John of Patmos of not presenting a revelation at all, but of appropriating a truer, more ancient historiography for eccliastical and political reasons. Not above placing his own eccentric opinions of government in this tract, he could be accused of mounting his own pulpit, if with literary distinction. His claim of an affirming devotion to the visible universe as the only 'true' route to the holy can be countered by reading some of the lively writings of Christian ascetics. This treatise, however, is not about them. It is aimed squarely at the convention seeking, socially regulating, sanctimonious attitudes that had censored and prosecuted him. Not surprisingly it did not raise his stock much among his critics, but it is an essential text in understanding the underlying motives behind his works.

Although Lawrence's writings are noted for more earthly activities, he shows a surprising knowledge of Biblical matters. In this book he analyzes the last book of the Bible-- Revelations-- and not too favorably at that. I cannot argue with his facts because I am not as familiar with them as as he is. What I find fascinating about this essay-book are his observations on democracy, and especially about life.

The last page or two contain one of his most remarkable and inspiring observations about the individual and his soul. Lawrence often argues that you cannot "save" you soul; you must "live" it. Near the end of this book he writes:

"What man most passionately want is his living wholeness and his living unison, not his own isolate salvation of his "soul." Man wants his physical fulfilment first and foremost, since now, once and once only, he is in the flesh and potent. For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos....I am part of the great whole, and I can never escape. But I can deny my connections, break them, and become a fragment. Then I am wretched."

The most poignant phrase in this passage is "...and ours for a short time only." Lawrence lived a shorter time that most of us will, but in his lifetime his output was as perceptive and prodigious as any author who has ever written. Scattered throughout this book are irritating but illuminating thoughts like: "But a democracy is bound in the end to be obscene, for it is composed of myriad disunited fragments, each fragment assuming to itself a false wholeness, a false individuality. Modern democracy is made up of millions of frictional parts all asserting their own wholeness."

Some people have taken that statement as proof that Lawrence is against democracy. But I consider it a valid danger for democracy, one that is being played out in the press every day. To preserve democracy, the best of all possible forms of government, we have to analyze and try to correct its failings and weaknesses.

Puzzle your way through this book. I hope you will find it as rewarding as I did.

Attacks everything blindly and madly promoted by the dominant ideas of the dominant socio-economic classes and strongest institutionalized influences in the current civilization of inauthenticity and death.

The power of money must go, according to Lawrence, as the power of the sun must return--as it indeed has always been the power of life whether we recognize it or not. Also, the power of blood must be reasserted. As human beings we are connected to all things. However, this perspective is suppressed as it constitutes a threat to the status quo.

Lawrence here sees no salvation in either democracy or western monotheism; but solely in human beings connecting up once again to the universal forces of nature from which come life's vitality.

This was the first book to question the veracity of T. E. Lawrence. The author was a well known man of letters and had been a serving British officer on the Western Front. He was indignant that Lawrence had come to be regarded as the greatest English hero of World War I. Today, historians accept that Seven Pillars of Wisdom is mostly fiction; but in 1955, Aldington was put under a virtual boycott for saying so. It is very curious that a neurotic like Lawrence should have become the object of a cult of personality that is almost unique in the 20th century. If, as his many admirers maintain, Lawrence was a sort of genius, his genius lay in making himself a full blown myth. Aldington, a fine writer, is almost forgotten, which is a pity. His book is extensively researched and fluently written.

Interesting book... picked up in used bookstore. The author has an attitude but admits it early. Excellent research and support of his conclusions... a realistic look at the Legend. A historical piece that will interest those with some knowledge of Lawrence. It is dated but still timely... when looking at heroes, you need to walk around them ... and this book does.

I think that Candide, by Voltaire is a must-read. It mocks the traditonal views of optimism and takes on a almost, humorous approach to telling that story. It also teaches a lesson of contentment and it shows how Candide experienced the contentment of El Dorado and the sybolism of El Dorado to God's kingdom.

Sarcasm, plus. Interesting "jazz" styling and a final hundred pages that bring home the horrors of war.

This is a nice book. Describes how stuborne T.E.L's friends were when any critic wanted to publish anything that contradicted their belifes. Mostly just a combination of the letters Aldington and others wrote while he was trying to publish his book on T.E.L.