Peter Russell is at his lyrical and satirical best in the Elegies of his
alter ego Quintilius, a disaffected and maverick late Latin poet whose
scabrous observations on the last decadent days and collapse of the
Roman Empire, seen from a provincial perspective, are sharply pertinent
to our own age. This enlarged edition reissues with much uncollected
material a famous modernist jeu d'esprit which gave Peter Russell his
true poetic voice - dyspeptic, witty, coruscating and chilled by sudden
apprehensions of mortality.