[Enright's Daughters of Earth is] a better volume than he has recently given us, more varied and less repetitive, more obliquely subtle yet also more trenchant. And the pictures of life in Singapore and Japan in his [Foreign Devils] … seem sharper than usual; and name names.

Enright is still writing with a despairing smile about a teacher's failure to communicate, about the pretensions of governments and the miseries of peoples in poor or 'developing' countries ('Tourist Promotion', 'Board of Selection'), and about hanging on, despite everything, to a faith in some humane western values. And no attitude, whether strenuously ideological, or high-minded, or just innocent, is ever right or untarnished. But in these two selections, the manner, the subjects and the treatment all seem to have gained a fresh lease of energy now that he has settled again in England after his long years teaching Eng. Lit. overseas...