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 assemblage of characters shaped in the round by the hand of a skilled novelist; a profound meditation on the central core of Fascism; a witty running commentary on the fixed differences between men and women; soliloquies, ranging from the tragic to the humorous, on the wayward nature of the human animal; literary conversations as searching and brilliant as anything of their kind since the famous Shakespeare...