The Elephant and the Polish QuestionThe Elephant and the Polish Questionby Maurice Craig \n \nPart meditation, part autobiography, part exploration, part miscellany, The Elephant and the Polish Question is the distillation of a literary life of more than forty years. Owing something to Trivia, the Notebooks of Samuel Butler, and Norman Douglas, it touches on many subjects about which the author has thought but not hitherto had the chance to write, from coincidences to funerary customs,

and gives a rich description of the atmosphere of the Dublin parliament during these heady years

command of the imperial forces in South Africa 1898-9

when the town in which I am writing was a little different and trees hung at the end of the town

of past merging with present through landscape and mindscape

humanitarian involvement

on literature (from Donne to Hazlitt

Ramsay MacDonald and Lord Londonderry among other – while relishing her friendships with leading writers and artists of the day such as George Bernard Shaw

was published privately by The Dolmen Press in 1986

Is economic growth improving our lives

is a leading expert on the life and achievements of Ernest Shackleton

saints and demons in a land subject to the vagaries of plague

The author also presents new evidence to vindicate Lawrence’s account in the Seven Pillars of the brutal sexual assault on him at Deraa during the Arab Revolt of 1916–18