Despite its somewhat strange and cryptic title, this book, the last work of noted West Australian scholar the late Professor Leslie Marchant, is a fascinating work, filled with information and interest. 

Dr Craig Stockings’s book examines the capture of Bardia in greater detail than earlier accounts. The first two parts of the book are more satisfying than the third, which suffers from definitional looseness and circular arguments.

No one in this room needs to be told of the horror and the tragedy of the Holocaust. It was the defining moral event of the twentieth century. Virtually everyone in this room was personally touched, either directly or indirectly, by those events. The significance of remembrance is now well established, at least to people such as us. It is not always so well established to others. Whilst it may be true that, for many, there is a certain amount of overload on the subject of the Holocaust, nevertheless, it is a theme that repeats itself again and again. We cannot leave it alone because of the extraordinary range of human characteristics, ranging from satanic evil on the one hand to the most self-denying personal altruism on the other, which it evoked.

Anyone who has attempted to compose rhyming verse in English must have come up against one of the limitations of the language. That is, as compared to for example the Romance languages, French and Italian, or to Russian, there is in English a relative shortage of words that rhyme with one another. The inevitable result is that our versifiers are at times unable to express their intended thoughts while fulfilling the demands of the chosen form. Indeed, it is not unknown for English-language poets to end up saying something other than what they meant to, and this can even work to their advantage.