SOURCE: Laird, Nick. “The Apparatchik's Daughter.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5143 (26 October 2001): 21.

In the following review, Laird contends that the use of a female narrator in No Saints or Angels adds to the book's clever and engaging plot.

In a letter to the Editor of the New York Review of Books (July 21, 1988), Czeslaw Milosz upbraided Al Alvarez for a positive and respectful review of his Collected Poems, complaining that Alvarez shoehorned his poetry into an outdated mode of thinking about Eastern European writing as being essentially a reactive art, an exact and opposite impulse to the pressures of oppression.

History. Society. If a literary critic is fascinated with them, that's his choice; if, however, he is insensitive to another dimension, he risks to curtail his right to reflect on literature. Perhaps some Western writers are longing for subjects provided by spasms of historical violent change, but I can assure...