The essays and causeries gathered in this collection of Frederic Raphael's provocative and corrective 'occasional writings' are not all on Jewish themes. But the author is undeniably a Jew, a sceptical Jew of Anglo-American parents and largely European experience and habit. He is a liberal, middle-class novelist and screen-writer for whom modern literary and social history is a puzzlement demanding close analytical attention. As the title, with its wry allusion to Shelley, suggests, it is impossible to forget the past. Raphael is, after all, an accomplished classicist. But how shall we make 'reasonable' sense of a world that has proven and proves unreasonable time after time? By close attention to facts and what they can mean, to the written word and what it can mean and conceal; by a refusal to acquiesce in inhumanity. 'Art', he declares, `is the only means by which we can combine truth with a certain hope.'

The essays, in a wonderfully readable and persuasive way, seek to indicate how a humane secular society can and must retain its roots in what it has perforce to transcend.