As soon as I read the title, I welcomed Mr Gough Whitlam’s pamphlet following perhaps an instinctual and rather biased interest in all that concerns both Italian and English literatures, and even more so whenever I come across an analysis of cross-currents between the two. My enthusiasm, however, was but short-lived. What the booklet offers, in fact, is only an enormous and indigestible amount of information, collated in a hopscotch fashion, with hardly any attempt to classify it in any way or to illustrate the purpose of such a mammoth task; it eventually fails to offer the reader a satisfactory overall picture, however superficial, of what the author means by ‘Italian Inspiration in English Literature’.

Although, in the concluding section, Mr Whitlam does apologise for the compilatory nature of his ‘opus’ (as he calls it himself in the very first line of the script) and justified it as merely a modest attempt to create a dynamic enough stimulus to trigger off further and more specialized research with the subject, why go to such lengths to achieve this dull and uninspiring result, when there have already been other and more authoritative voices on the matter, who are not perhaps so encyclopedic but who nevertheless are much more rewarding and challenging?