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Tuesday, January 06, 2026

qntm - There is no Antimemetics Division

The online SCP Foundation, via the SCP Wiki, has been a source of excellent fictional writing focused on the idea that various secret organisations exist that study and fight paranormal, alien and (sometimes comic) supernatural creatures and species. Qntm, the pen-name of Sam Hughes, has produced an excellent novel based on their writing on the SCP Wiki and various short stories. There is No Antimemetics Division is based around Marie Quinn, the leader of the Antimemetics Division which fights various alien and supernatural creatures, most I think of which appear on the SCP Wiki.

The story begins with some of the more mundane events, where it becomes clear that there are many existing threats to the Division and to humanity in general. But what also slowly emerges is that there are layers on experiences and knowledge that are hidden from the characters themselves. Fighting monsters that can live in ideas, or thoughts, or their awareness of you, means sometimes having to forget key pieces of information. Then there is the problem that some of the monstrous threats alter or destroy memories. So the joke of the book's inner flap "Welcome to the Antimemetics Division, this is not your first day" is a very real one for employees of the Division.

What quickly becomes clear is that there is a very big conspiracy that is threatening reality itself. Quinn is central to fighting this, but she's not entirely aware of her role, and some of the best bits of the novel are those where characters like Quinn find hidden information or even special firewalled offices that allow them to discuss infomation they have forgotten.

One of the great things about the SCP Foundation has always been the way it gives the reader tantalising glimpses of wider stories. If this was all qntm's novel did it would probably work - especially because frequently these glimpses come through the character's own discovery of knowledge of their forgotten memories. But the novel really works because there is a good story here too. Quinn discovers that the Division is shrinking. They are losing their war. This is deeply personal for her and this loss is at multiple levels. In fact the reader is not just an observer - we know things that Quinn forgets. This allows a level of horror to develop beyond that of just that caused by death and destruction.

Related Reviews

Lacroix - Here and Beyond
Elliott - Awakened
Moore - The Great When
Bester - The Demolished Man

Wednesday, December 31, 2025

Ben Ware - On Extinction: Beginning again at the end

It seems fitting that my last book review of 2025 is "on extinction". After all, this year once again broke records for temperature, extreme weather, floods and so on, and also saw a failed climate COP. The human cost of these tragedies is growing, and the outlook is bleak. But Ben Ware's On Extinction is not a catalogue of disaster, nor an interrogation of the science, or indeed a historical study like Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction.

Ware's book is an attempt to grapple with how we understand extinction philosophically and the limitations of what he calls "progressive liberalism". In other words the book is a critique of how we think about the end of the world and what we imagine can be constructed instead. I will admit that I approached the book with some trepidation - I am not someone for whom philosophy comes naturally. That said Ware's book was accessible, stimulating and I was carried along by his easy prose.

At the heart of the book are two related discussions. The first is the aforementioned inability of liberal political thought to construct an alternative to capitalism that can avoid catastrophe even in the imaginations of the liberals. The second is the concept of revolution. Revolution is an essential alternative to capitalism's logic of accumulation ("moses and the prophets", says Marx). It is capitalism that is dragging us under, but it is also the only framework most people have - witness a host of books written by well meaning academics and writers anxious about the future, but ideologically unable to imagine anything different.

Ware says that in 1921, the Marxist Walter Benjamin described "capitalism as a demonic cult, 'perhaps the most extreme that ever existed'." Capitalism is, for Benjamin, a celebratory cult where there is no break, no holiday, every day "demands the utter fealty of its worshippers". Ware contines:

In the first instance, the demonic figures as a kind of bad infinite: it is surplus-producing activity without cessation - activity that threatens the complete destruction of human existence... a crucial second sense... [capitalism] establishes guilt/debt as the organizing principle of social relations."

The second demonic sense Benjamin explains is that this guilt/debt causes the "expansion of despair, until despair becomes a religious state of the world." What does guilt/debt/despair mean in this context?

Our guilt/debt is part of the compulsion to behave in a particular way. To spend, to work, to obey. And in doing so we acccept we will live in a system of exploitation and oppression, war and homelessness, poverty amid plenty. But for the capitalist it might refer to the compulsion they experience to endlessly accumulate due to the competition inherent in the system. We have seemingly no choice but to sell our labour, and buy their commodities. They have to behave in a particular way too. Ware analyses this through a brief study of the popular series Squid Game (which I haven't seen). The winner of that (imaginery) game carries with them, the "guilt-burden" of everyone else's failure. Or, "their new-found wealth remaining permanently indebted to a system of suffering, exploitation, and sadistic enjoyment". That at least is not fiction.

Ware concludes however by saying that "we might say that the only thing one is certain of under capitalism is one's guilt... but this then creates an issue that Benjamin does not exxplore... how to deal with accumulated guilt."

Ware points out that for Marx the vampire of capitalism sucks the life blood from the worker, it is a "mechanical monster" whose "demonic power", "drains the life-energy from the body of every man, woman and child". But crucially for Marx the worker is also the "active agent of political change, the potential motor of world history". For Marx this potential for revolutionary transformation is the hope. But for many revolution is not about fundamental change, it is about internal change.

Ware looks at this through a discussion of Kant. Ware says:

For Kant, one becomes morally a 'good' person only through a 'revolution' in one's 'disposition';, through a kind of 'rebirth' or 'new creation'... political enlightenment, but contrast, can only be achieved 'slowly', by a gradualist movement from worse to better... In relation to the French experiment, what matters is not the revolution itself but instead the way in which it allows enthusiastic spectators to extract moral and aesthetic capital form it. What Kant thus appears to want is revolution without Revolution.

Here I think Ware nails things exactly in relation to contemporary politics:

What we encounter here then... is a version of torday's 'progressive' left liberalism: a politics that is bringin with enthusiasm when it comes to 'looking at' the burning issues of the day - ecological devastation, accelerating inequality, the threat of nuclear war - but which... has not the slightest intention of activiely participationg in anything that would change the political and economimc conditions from which these problems emerge.

Think of all those failed COP meetings, the heart-searching articles and books by the likes of Bill Gates, or countless academics, whose hope is to reinvent capitalism or defang it to make it all nicer. The alternative has to be revolutionary. Here Ware returns to despair, but this time reconstructed as a potential force to encourage change:

By opening outselves uip to the force of despair, we arrive (potentially at least) at a properly political truth: the problems we confront cannot be resolved within the existing framework, and so it is the framework itself that must be transformed.

It is a powerful conclusion and reminds us of the power of philosophy. Ware's book is a polemic, but it is not one that I expected - it left me enthused and stimulated, and enlightened (in the best sense). But it is also encouraging that at least in Ware's response to extinction the working class, as a class, is at the heart of his answer. On Extinction covers a lot of ground in its 150 pages. Ware touches on a host of philosophers and thinkers, and many cultural milestones (some of which are quite obscure). Nonetheless this is a stimulating book that will provoke plenty of debate, argument and inspiration too.

Related Reviews

Dawson - Extinction: A Radical History
Kolbert - The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

Tuesday, December 30, 2025

Riley Black - The Shortest History of the Dinosaurs

Riley Black's The Shortest History of the Dinosaurs is a remarkable book that places dinosaurs in their historical and ecological context. But it also shows how our own understanding of dinosaurs is constantly changing. As such the book is also a history of paleontology. As Black jokes in her afterword, "in the past two hundred years our favorite prehistoric creatures have stompled through our imaginations as immense lizards, leaping oddities, tail-dragging dullards and rainbow-coloured fluffballs". By placing dinosaurs in their wider ecological, social and historical context a new understand emerges. This ecological approach is important. Dinosaurs are changing, growing and developing creatures. They are, in consequence, very real.

This was brought home to me when I was lucky enough to visit the Museum of the Rockies in Montana. There a fantastic display Triceratops skulls shows how the animal heads changed through their lives. Later, adult, skulls had huge fans and horns. But also holes (fenestra as they are known) in their fans which only developed later in life. Dinosaurs, like Triceratops, grew up. Their bodies changed constantly, and as Black repeatedly points out, so likely did their behaviour.

For instance the horns or clubs of dinosaurs have usually been understood as weapons - reflecting a tendency for nature to be understood as "red in tooth and claw". While it is undoubtably true that dinosaurs hunted each other and bit each other, it is far from the only use for such features. Black shows how horns and claws are more likely to have been used for multiple purposes (as many animals do today) having roles in development, mating or fighting. It is very unlikely that given the variety of dinosaur horn arrangements, they "all evolved their horns to principally ward off predators" otherwise "there would likely be an ideal configuration for telling tyrannosaurs to back off". Instead the variety of horn arrangements suggests that "interactions between individuals of the species were a central factor in how these dinosaurs evolved".

Black shows how palentologists have had to break with older ideas to allow us to understand dinosaurs in a new way. It is hard not to conclude that some of the newer approaches to ecology that have developed in recent decades are part of this changing view of the dinosaurs. The environmental crises have changed our understanding of how human society interacts with nature, and this has led to new approaches to how we should understand the interaction between living things and their environment. Black's book feels refreshing in this regard. It moves us on from simply seeing dinosaurs as carnivorous individuals fighting over a herbivore carcass as they are often portrayed in books or on screen. Indeed, Black repeatedly encourages us to see dinosaurs within their wider context - including non-dinosaur animals. Here again the reader is encouraged to think differently:

The supposed antagonism between dinosaurs and mammals has been overplayed, and in some ways misunderstood because of a focus on competition for ecological prominence.... The emerging pictures is that competition between different forms of early mammals restricted the evolution of our ancestors, not the dinosaurs.

The competition between species may have been less important than the interactions between individuals of the same species. Here I really enjoyed (and learned a lot from) Black's discussion of the rearing of young dinosaurs, and how adults treated their eggs. Sometimes they cared for them, and sometimes they left the eggs alone and the young to fend for themselves. But whichever strategy was adopted by different dinosaur species, it had consequences for the behaviour of the young and for the wider ecology. Take young T-Rexs. Their very existence likely changed the local ecology, but also the fossil record. As Black says of the T-Rex young they took up the "distinct ecological role of the medium-size predators that we would expect to find, preventing other dinosaur species from taking it up. it's one reason that the Hell Creek Formation... sometimes seems to have lower dinosaur diversity than other habitats".

Of course dinosaurs, like all living creatures, transformed their own environment. Black gives several examples of how they changed the landscape - creating pools through their size and weight, or ensuring that a forest would have had plenty of open space as well as woodland. The disappearance of the dinosaurs then opened up an evolutionary space where mammals could become dominant, but so could many other forms of flora and fauna. Dinosaurs were not isolated lizards. They were social creatures that changed their environment and evolved, developed and disappeared over a huge period of time. Black reminds us that the later dinosaurs could possibly have walked past fossils of their older ancestors. It is a startling reminder of how old the Earth is, and how long the time of the dinosaurs was.

Since reading one of Riley Black's earlier books The Last Days of the Dinosaurs I have enthused about it to everyone who mentions dinosaurs to me. The Shortest History of the Dinosaurs is a fine volume that broadens the story and places dinosaurs in a much wider context. Anyone who wants an introduction to the dinosaurs that shows how we have changed our understanding of these fabulous beasts will enjoy this book. Its an excellent, entertaining and insightful read.

Monday, December 29, 2025

Ivan Doig - Dancing at the Rascal Fair

*** Warning Spoilers ***

The second volume of Ivan Doig's Montana Trilogy, is the first chronologically. It probably doesn't matter whether you read this, or English Creek first, because these are independent tales. But Dancing at the Rascal Fair sets up the origins of most of the people who live in Two Medicine Country, a fictional area of Montana just east of the Rockies towards the Canadian border.

Rob Barclay and Angus McCaskill are leaving Scotland to head to Montana where Rob's uncle Lucas is working as a miner. Lucas sends money home every year - sizeable chunks - and Rob and Angus are attracted to the good pay and better quality of life than late 19th century Scotland can offer. Montana is a land of opportunity, riches, good land and an escape from grinding poverty.

The first chapters have a dreamlike quality as Angus narrates his and Rob's voyage and then their long search in Montana's new towns for Lucas. Eventually they end up in Two Medicine Country, where Lucas is not mining, but running a bar and the two of them join Lucas in sheep business. Right from the start the messy reality of small, close-knit, emigre communities is there. Rob falls for Lucas' partner - and getting him and Angus to homestead in the mountains is part of making sure this doesn't get even more messy.

But it is Angus whom we follow for the next generation, as he farms, clears, and also teaches in the local school. He meets, and falls hard for Anna, another teacher and hopes to marry her. When she choses someone else, in part for economic reasons, Angus is desroyed and marries Rob's sister who has been brought over for that purpose. Their's is a caring and loving marriage, but Angus' love for Anna hangs over it like a shroud. Eventually Rob is unable to cope with Angus' unrequited love and hope and their brotherly, almost lovelike, relationship comes apart.

For while this is a story of love and humanity, it's set against the harsh backdrop of Montana's climate and the economic and political reality of the early 20th century. Boys get sent to fight in the trenches, influenza hits and the farming economy goes through its ups and downs. In addition harsh winters, dry summers and the gradual changing of farming practices transform the area and drive some to poverty.

Doig is wonderfully skilful at placing the human emotions of his characters against the backdrop of economic crisis, winter storms, drought and war. We're rooting for his people, while anxious for their survival. Dancing at the Rascal Fair is no cowboy adventure. Its the story of what happens over time. The book takes place over thirty or forty years, yet some chapters deal at length with a handful of days. It gives the reader a feeling of an epic, while occasionally zooming in on great detail.

What happens to Angus, Rob and the others is, in many ways, shaped by forces beyond their control. There's little here about the US's own politics - other than setting up of the National Forests which plays a big part in English Creek. Instead characters play their parts against a backdrop of events out of their control. That, I think is a deliberate ploy to make the reader think about the people.

It should be noted that one group of people who are not here in detail are the Native Americans. Its probably a criticism of Doig's fiction that he neglects their place in Montana's history (though this isn't true of all his books - see Winter Brothers). Here they are literarily unnamed, but ever present in a Reservation on the other side of the hill. Doig's focus on emigrant and immigrant lives reminds us that the modern US was built in part on the labour of economic migrants. But the other part - the genocide - is absent.

That criticism aside, this is a deeply moving look at the lives that people live, which forms the backdrop to modern Montana.

Friday, December 26, 2025

Francis Pryor - Paths to the Past: Encounters with Britain's hidden landscapes

Francis Pryor's books have been some of the most accessible and popular guides to British landscape history. Works such as Britain BC have helped us understand how monuments like Stonehenge are actually part of a human landscape shaped by thousands of years of labour. Pryor's work with Time Team and his pioneering work as a farmer, archaeologist and historian have offered unique perspectives on history, land and society.

Paths to the Past is a short collection of very brief essays, twenty-four in all, that are Pryor's highly personal engagement with a variety of unusual and sometimes spectacular sites and buildings. These range from very large areas - such as Orkney's neolithic landscape - to the very small: Cromwell's Bridge in Lancashire. In each place Pryor explores the buildings, the human landscape and the natural world. Pryor's aim with the book is to encourage the reader to visit these places, and he certainly did provide a number of places for me to go in the future.

Unfortunately I found that while all of the essays are interesting, they tend to be interesting because of the places that Pryor is describing rather than his particular insights. I was constantly underwhelmed. Each of the essays left me feeling that Pryor was going to give us some great insight, but I was left wanting. Sometimes its no more than saying he felt the presence of the past. After a visit to the Great Orme Bronze Age mines in North Wales Pryor writes that he was "standing in their space, listening to their sounds".

On a number of occasions I also felt that Pryor's approach to history was to separate humanity from the landscape. More problematically there is no sense of struggle in Pryor's work. There's hard labour, such as that of the Bronze Age miners squeezing through dangerous passages, but there's no struggle. Enclosure is simply described as a process of landscape change made by landowners, rather than the centuries long battle over land, space and political rights that resulted in the great defeat of the English peasantry. That's a far more interesting story and one that surely has resonnances to today.

These are interesting places and Pryor writes about them very well (few authors can make a reader want to visit a shopping centre in Peterborough). But it felt removed from the engaging (and pathbreaking) work that Pryor has produced previously and which I have celebrated. See links below.

Wednesday, December 24, 2025

Paul Frölich - Rosa Luxemburg

Rosa Luxemburg was one of the most remarkable revolutionaries to emerge from the European socialist milieu in the late 19th century. There is a tendency on the left to discuss Luxemburg in the context of things that she wrote or did that were wrong. I've been to many meetings which bemoan her failure to "launch a revolutionary party" early, rather than staying part of the German Social Democratic Party, hence dooming the German Revolution. These are, of course, crude criticisms even if they do have some basis. Nonetheless it is important that we say, as Lenin did:

'Eagles may at times fly lower than hens but hens can never rise to the height of eagles'. Rosa Luxemburg was mistaken on the question of the independence of Poland; she was mistaken in 1903 in her appraisal of Menshevism; she was mistaken on the theory of accumulation of capital; she was mistaken in July 1914, when, together with Plekhanov, Vandervelde, Kautsky and others she advocated unity between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks; she was mistaken in what she wrote in prison in 1918 (She corrected most of these mistakes at the end of 1918 and the beginning of 1919 when she was released). But inspite of her mistakes she was and remains for us an eagle. And not only will Communists all over the world cherish her memory, but her biography and her complete works will serve as useful manuals for training many generations of communists all over the world.

Paul Frölich's biography of Luxemburg was one of the very first to be written, and was published in unusal circumstances just before World War Two. In fact the English translation became a huge best seller as part of the Left Book Club during the War. It is very much a political biography that places her ideas in the context of her political activty and her organisational context. The Lenin quote above matters not just because of his list of criticisms, or indeed his celebration of Luxemburg's work - but his acknowledgement that her ideas changed in the context of struggle. Indeed part of the celebration of her work that Lenin mentions was impossible because the archive that Frölich built up was trapped by Stalin during WWII and kept from the movement.

What shines through is Luxemburg's understanding of political theory and strategy, based always on working class power. For instance, in the great debate within the German left about how the left should organise and the role of parliamentary activity, Frölich says that Luxemburg

did not insist merely on agitation: the task of a socialist parliamentarian also consisted in taking part in the positive legislative work, whenever possible with practical success-a task which would become increasingly difficult with the strengthening of the party’s representation in parliament. The task could be correctly fulfilled only if Social Democracy retained an awareness of its role as an oppositional party and, at the same time, found the golden mean between sectarian negation and bourgeois parliamentarism-always remembering that its real strength lay outside parliament, in the proletarian masses. Above all, however, it had to give up without reservation the illusion that a working-class party could overpower a capitalist state by a majority vote in parliament, i.e. solely by parliamentary means.

Nonetheless it is clear that the context of Luxemburg's main area of work - the German socialist movement - did have its impact on her throught. Frölich's book is very much a celebration of Luxemburg's work and life - but he isn't uncritical. But in one area he does acknowledge mistakes - her debate with Lenin over the question of political organisation.

This first disagreement between her and Lenin-even if all the various background factors are taken into consideration-nevertheless revealed characteristic differences between these two great leader personalities. Luxemburg underestimated the power of organisation, particularly when the reins of leadership were in the hands of her opponents. She relied all too believingly on the pressure of the revolutionary masses to make any corrections in party policy. Lenin’s total political view prior to 1917 shows traces of unmistakably Blanquist influences and an exaggerated voluntarism, though he quickly overcame it when faced with concrete situations. To overstate the point, it can be said that Rosa concerned herself more with the historical process as a whole and derived her political decisions from it, while Lenin’s eye was more concentrated on the final aim and sought the means to bring it about. For her the decisive element was the mass; for him it was the party, which he wanted to forge into the spearhead of the whole movement.

This is a much better approach than the "she didn't set up a revolutionary party" argument. Not least because it is clear that Luxemburg did always fight for revolutionary organisation, and I was reminded that the Polish group she led played such a role in the crucial war years and during the 1917 revolutionary period.

Perhaps the most interesting discussion of Luxemburg's "mistakes" are in her work on the accumulation of capital. Here again there's a tendency for some reviewers simply to say that she was wrong. Yet in doing so they miss Luxemburg's real attempt to grapple with the limits of Marx's own work on accumulation (born out of his abstraction of the economy from reality in order to clarify his argument) and the fact that she was one of the first to link accumulation to imperialist expansion. She was also, it should be said, someone who was very clear about the role of imperialism in the destruction of indigenous peoples. Her theory here may not be fully developed, but it is a very real attempt to place a Marxist critique of capitalism into a global context.

Luxemburg's work also included two other great pieces of work that developed revolutionary politics to adapt to new eras. Her Reform or Revolution and The Mass Strike both remain indispensible booklets for socialists in the 21st centutry as we grapple with the interactions between social movements, capital and political organisation. The Mass Strike in particular will no doubt be read again and again as workers engage in mass struggles over austerity and politics. The "Gen X" revolts spring to mind.

But it is in the last four years of her life that Rosa Luxemburg comes into her own. Her fight to shape a new revolutionary era out of the ruins of the betrayal of the German socialist movement at the start of World War One and then her attempts to learn from and extend the revolutionary epoch after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Here Frölich engages with her criticisms of the Russian Revolution and the policies of the Bolsheviks, particular towards the National and Agrarian questions. He acknowledges her errors, while placing them in context. Not least the fact that Luxemburg was in prison and had limited access to the movement at times. Nonetheless we see how Luxemburg is constantly striving to develop the movement, and with the outbreak of the German Revolution we she how her politics place her far ahead of almost all her comrades. Her clarity of ideas in December 1918 and January 1919 with the counter-revolution flexing its muscles is poignant given her murder by them in early January.

There is no doubt that the loss of Luxemburg robbed the German working class of one of its most able leaders. Frölich's book is one of the best introductions to her life and politics, but it is also an incredible celebration of working class power and the vision of socialism from below that Luxemburg strived for her whole life. If at times it feels a little hagiographic this is, perhaps, to be expected given that Frölich is writing in the darkest period for humanity as Hitler has won and Stalin's politics is stamping over the revolutionary tradition that Paul Frölich's subject stood for.

Related Reviews

Gietinger - The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg
Luxemburg - Reform or Revolution
Luxemburg - The Mass Strike
Campbell - A Rebel's Guide to Rosa Luxemburg

Monday, December 22, 2025

Chris Harman - Spartacus and the Slave Revolt that Shook the Roman Empire

Redwords have been bringing out a series of books with transcripts of talks by leading Marxists with new introductions. This little book is based on a talk by Chris Harman at Marxism 1998 in London as part of a course on battles that changed the world. In the talk Harman jokes that the reading wasn't to difficult as there are only two sources for the Spartacus rebellion, and these amount to five pages or so. But what we do know tells us a great deal about Ancient Rome and the position of slaves within it. Harman's historical materialist approach places the battles of the Third Servile War in the wider context of the development of Rome and the limits of the Roman Empire.

Give the short nature of the text Harman only touches on some subjects. Indeed, as Christian Høgsbjerg notes in his extremely useful introduction, at one point in the talk Harman realises he is running out of time and has to summarise a lot of material. It is useful then that Høgsbjerg has access to Harman's original notes as he is able to construct and include material that Harman couldn't include on the day of the talk. But two aspects of the talk remain vitaly important. The first is Harman's summary of the class nature of Roman society and how the army was an essential part of this:

Essentially, what happened was the victory of the Roman armies led to two sorts of immense wealth flooding to Rome. One was the immense wealth coming from the territoties which were conquered by Rome.. the second form of wealth ... was the massive enslavement of populations.

Harman continues:

The Roman rich had these vast sums of wealth... [which] enabled them to buy the slaves off the Roman state, and they systematically then established a situation in which they began tilling their estates with slave. And their calculation was quite simply this. 'The Roman army is invincible. Every year, we conquer more people. Every time we conquer more people, we enslave more people, there's an endless supply of slaves'.

This leads us to the second point of Harman's argument. This model was unsustainable and sections of Roman society understood this. The contradiction was that the cost of fighting the wars became prohibitive, and to try to resolve things the Roman ruling class tried to change society, by setting up forms of serfdom. But the centrality of slavery (and war) to the Roman economy made this impossible.

This then places the activity of Spartacus and his rebels into context. Because the taking of Rome by the rebels would have meant them implementing the very regime they were rebelling against (they were, after all, former slaves). Harman's conclusion was that the revolt was heroic, but "history hadn't advanced to such a point in which it's possible for an oppressed class to see overthrowing the empire and estabishing itself as a new ruling class upon a higher, better form of organisation of society". In other words, rather like the peasants of the German Peasants' War, their victory could never be permanent, even if they could never overcome the ruling class's forces.

While it's a short pamphlet and, to be honest, Harman's speaking style doesn't readily translate into an easy reading text, there's a great deal in this talk. Once again Chris Harman's historical materialist approach gives us far more insights that we might expect from just five pages of original source material. Christian Høgsbjerg's excellent editing, introduction and footnotes flesh out the material and make this a fine quick read.