Ulysses and Faust: Tradition and Modernism from Homer Till the Present: by Harry Redner, New York, Routledge, 2018, 293 pp., £120.00 (cloth), £36.99 (paper), £31.44 (ebook).

Almost two years ago I reviewed I The Triumph and Tragedy of the Intellectuals i by Harry Redner in these pages; Redner, in turn, around much the same time had reviewed a book by Beibei Guan and myself on Charles Baudelaire and what we considered mistaken about Walter Benjamin's politicized aesthetics. Much of the brilliance of I Ulysses and Faust i shines through in the aperçus that abound throughout, and one can see that Redner is as thrilled by the works he is reading as he is by the discoveries he makes in undertaking the exploration. Just before his death he had completed a book criticizing the managerial ethos of the university and academic publishing - the very project strikes me as a fitting adieu from Harry to an institution that had provided him, and those who learnt from him, with so much only to evaporate before his eyes. [Extracted from the article]