When someone as responsible as Rebecca West sets herself to write, and succeeds in writing, over half a million words about Yugoslavia, one can be pretty sure that she has more than Yugoslavia on her mind. Penetrate the fastnesses of her two cyclopean volumes called "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon" and you encounter far more than an impassioned survey of the history, topography, and peoples of Yugoslavia. Here's what you will meet: glittering bits and pieces of a philosophy of history; an a...

Miss West, or Dame Rebecca as she is now styled, may still have an Ibsen conscience, but her world has flowered well beyond introspection, and [Rebecca West: A Celebration] has collected much of it. Some will say too much, for it is made up of many subjects and cannot easily be read through. It celebrates the milestones of her long career, journalistic, novelistic, and biographical, and includes large chunks of her most famous work, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon…. The publishers, looking back now from a...