The book also contains short surveys of the careers, writing and influence of such notable Indian writers as Michael Madhusudan Datta (1824-73), (‘the first modern poet of India’), Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) – who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913; and Saratchandra Chatterji (1876-1938). Mr Ray’s essay on Datta – even though regrettably he quotes only one poem from this writer – encourages one to read this poet even if only in translation. Among the achievements Mr Ray ascribes to Datta are not least that he ‘rescued Bengali poetry from parochial obsolescence and empty repetitiveness, gave it a new sensibility and power of self-development, and introduced it to the creative tensions of the modem world’.

Mr Ray outlines the social influences in India, not least the urge for secular freedom, bringing some of the more daring and articulate members of the urban Hindu middle classes into conflict with their families, castes and community – a situation which created a climate receptive to the genius of Tagore. It was indeed this very alienation of the thinking individual from ‘family, clan, society, tradition and political ideologies and institutions’ which contributed, as the author points out, to the central themes of Tagore’s stories, novels, plays and essays.

Chatterji is noteworthy because, according to Mr Ray, this prolific novelist was perhaps the most popular writer of his time, so much so, if one must put it on a material basis, that he was probably the first Indian writer to become ‘a man: of property’ from his writing income.

But it seems to me that Mr Ray is on less sure ground when he leaves his own country. I do not regard myself as qualified to discuss his largely philosophical essay on the ‘tragic humanism’ of Camus; his essay on Goethe is, as the title implies (‘Homage to Goethe’) largely a survey of Goethe’s achievement as the ‘grand culmination of the Renaissance’.

However the essay on Shaw seems to me more epigrammatic than critically constructive. ‘His wit has edge but little equipoise. His provocations excite but do not cause reverberations in the reader’s or the spectator’s consciousness. His art has no interior. ‘Well, maybe. But accepting this and other rather facile and cliché-ridden observations (‘. . . he wielded the sharp-edged weapon of comedy with extraordinary agility and unrelenting vigour’) I would have preferred to have more chapter and verse.

Mr Ray’s essay ‘Apartheid in Shakespeare’ seems to me to be a disaster. It is a pity it gave the title to what is after all a pretty entertaining collection of essays. Applying to Shakespeare the modern connotations of the South African situation and its counterparts in ‘the white colonists’ attitude to coloured Asians, Negroes, Red Indians or the Aborigines’ (Mr Ray seems to have a fixation about the treatment of the Australian Aborigines to which he refers three times in his essay) seems to me to make critical nonsense. Mr Ray forces his theme with three examples from Shakespeare – Shylock (where, we are told, Shakespeare ‘seems almost to anticipate the Nazis’), Othello and Caliban (on the dubious premise that the last-named represented ‘the European colonists view of the American Indian’). It is all utterly unconvincing and at best a piece of literary gimmickry.