SOURCE: "A London Dunghill," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4623, November 8, 1991, p. 31.

In the following review of The Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper, Mangan focuses on the sexual and scatalogical tone of the novel, passages of which he declares "rhetorical flights" and "sheer nonsense."

Paul West is an Englishman now in his early sixties, who emigrated to the United States in 1962 and now lives in New York State. His thirteenth novel is the first to be published in Britain, and it arrives surrounded by an honour-laden reputation which has also spread to France, by way of his two previous novels Rat Man of Paris and Lord Byron's Doctor. The territory he inhabits as novelist, poet and polemicist has recently been plotted in colourful detail by the French press, which traces his ancestry to Rabelais by way of the Elizabethans, and notes the significance of his professorial...