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IT could be said that since the Cuban crisis of 1962 the Caribbean region as a whole has been in a vacuum. Despite the Communist control of Cuba the West Indies are directly involved in the Cold War. Equally, they are not strong enough to pursue a positive policy of neutrality (though their insulation from world stresses has, I believe, encouraged the flowering of a distinctive West Indian culture, particularly in literature). The Americans are unlikely to allow any further Soviet penetration of the area; but appear to regard its many component parts as too small and poor to be either profitable or dangerous, except for the Dominican Republic and Haiti. The British, French and Dutch West Indies are thus left with the need to work out their own future.

Wordsworth went so far as to equate 'all good poetry' with 'the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings'. Lord Byron signatures were legibly classical: dramas set in the old unities of time, place and action; poetry, hewing to traditions of craft. In the poetics of sympathy, the genres turned inward. A poetry of gaps and indirections, of understatements and silences, required a new mode of reading, even a revolution of the kind that Jeffrey's impatience with the Ode intuited but was in no mood of mind to theorize. While Byron was working his new discoveries at home and then abroad, in 1817 a new periodical, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, launched a serial assault on a new London-suburbanism: 'The Cockney School of Poetry'. If the stories today credit its new poetries with a generative role in the history of English Literature, the old stories keep us alert to what Romantic-era poets and their readers knew, and knew not, as 'new'.

Accents of English is about the way English is pronounced by different people in different places. Volume 1 provides a synthesizing introduction, which shows how accents vary not only geographically, but also with social class, formality, sex and age; and in volumes 2 and 3 the author examines in greater depth the various accents used by people who speak English as their mother tongue: the accents of the regions of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland (volume 2), and of the USA, Canada, the West Indies, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, Black Africa and the Far East (volume 3). Each volume can be read independently, and together they form a major scholarly survey, of considerable originality, which not only includes descriptions of hitherto neglected accents, but also examines the implications for phonological theory. Readers will find the answers to many questions: Who makes 'good' rhyme with 'mood'? Which accents have no voiced sibilants? How is a Canadian accent different from an American one, a New Zealand one from an Australian one, a Jamaican one from a Barbadian one? What are the historical reasons for British-American pronunciation differences? What sound changes are currently in progress in New York, in London, in Edinburgh? Dr Wells his written principally for students of linguistics, phonetics and English language, but the motivated general reader will also find the study both fascinating and rewarding.