This is a selection from Herling's Journal Written at Night and is plainly a work of note. Herling (born 1919) is a senior Polish writer who was captured by the Russians in 1940 and spent two years in a Soviet labour camp; he now lives in Italy. The "journal" is not a diary or a series of brief jottings, it is more like a series of essays and meditations, some several pages long, on history, on writers (Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Mandelstam, etc) together with personal reminiscences including a description of an earthquake in Naples. The prose style is elegant and slightly ritualistic, and the book carries a good deal of intellectual weight.