Things I didn't know until I read William Taubman's superb biography of Nikita Khrushchev:

Chairman Mao was outraged at the presumptuous bullying of the upstart Soviets, and held K in contempt as a hick. One day without warning (during a conference in China), Mao suggested that he and K continue their consultation in the swimming pool. Mao, who was a powerful swimmer, plunged in from the deep end and continued lecturing K between strokes. K who could barely swim paddled around the shallow end until someone threw him a float (a rubber ducky?). K floated around in the ducky for a while as Mao continued to lecture. Finally K got out and sat on the edge of the pool, so at least Mao had to look up while he was talking.

During Richard Nixon's memorable 1959 visit, K took Nixon for a boat ride on the Moskva River. He stopped to visit picnickers and would say: yo, comrade! Are you imprisoned? Are you enslaved? (I was on the Moskva River last summer - the picnickers are still there) K made the trip in an embroidered Ukrainian folk shirt. Nixon, true to form, wore his blue business suit.

At the Ambassador Hotel in LA in 1960, K fell into an improvised harangue, expressing his resentment at not being permitted to go to Disneyland. Sitting at the table with K's wife, Nina Petrovna, Frank Sinatra leaned over to David Niven and said - screw the cops, tell the old lady we'll take him ourselves.

And best of all (I can't put my finger on it; I quote from memory)--

At a public appearance In London in (1956?) someone booed K. He had never heard a boo before. He asked his handler - what is this "ooh ooh" sound? The handler explained. K was fascinated. For the rest of the day, he went around muttering "Boo! Boo!"

These anecdotes only begin to suggest the richness of this wonderful biography, which accomplishes he formidable achievement of making K seem at once sympathetic and appalling. Sympathetic in that he was in so many ways a recognizable human being: energetic, warm-hearted, devoted to his (immediate?) family. He was also (and this is no small point) a true believer. We tend to think of the last generation of Soviet leaders as self-serving bureaucratic infighters who held onto power because they held onto power. But Taubman leaves you in no doubt that K thought he was building a better world.

Sympathetic, yes, but appalling: K was at the end of the day an unsophisticated peasant, crass and violent and almost fatally out of his depth as a political leader. Time and again he launched into schemes that he hadn't thought through - or hadn't the capacity to think through - inflicting untold suffering on innocent bystanders and at least once (the Cuban Missile Crisis) bringing us all to the edge of disaster (on this last, Allison & Zelikow, Essence of Decision, is a great companion piece). Taubman's account is longish, and from time to time he seems to dawdle over stories that may not be central to his plot. He has a big story to tell, and his can hardly be the last word. But as a convincing portrait, setting the personal in the midst of the political, Taubman's biography of K can hardly be bettered.

Last time I looked, Woodward & Bernstein's "All the President"s Men" had 58 Amazon reviews; Lukas' "Nightmare" had none. Now, that's a travesty. If you have to read just one book about Watergate this book has no competitor. If you have to read just one book to show what good journalism can be, ditto. We say that journalism at best is "a rough draft" and we need to await "the verdict of history." But Lukas put this together in a matter of months and after 30-odd years, it still stands unchallenged on the shelf.

The fulcrum of this book is, of course, the "third-rate burglary" from which Watergate takes its name. But Lukas is far-sighted enough not to begin with that. He gives us the larger context of the early Nixon years: the internal wiretapping, the fund-raising money machine, the systematic campaign of dirty tricks against the 1972 Democratic campaign, both primary and general.

Indeed, for me perhaps the true pivot point is not the burglary at all, but rather that moment in January, 1972, when Gordon Liddy launched "a well-prepared thirty-minute 'show-and-tell'" to introduced "Project Gemstone" -- intended as "a vast intelligence-gathering and dirty-tricks campaign" against the Democrats and (one would have to say) against the electoral process itself. Here it all is: electronic surveillance and wiretapping; breakins; kidnap squads; mugging squads; call girls; sabotage. John Dean says he found it "mind-boggling." But Attorney General John Mitchell was more restrained: "That's not quite what we had in mind," he said. And Jeb Magruder was more proactive: "Cheer up, Gordon," he said, "You just tone the plan down a little and we'll try again."

For my money, that is the point at which any decent public servant would have stood up and shouted "GET THIS GUY OUT OF HERE! Don't let him come within a dung-fork's distance of any public policy issue any time, anywhere, ever again." Of course we know better now: in fact, Liddy's campaign did go forward largely as he had planned it. And it was not a free-lance operation: rather, it was embedded at the very heart of the Nixon administration.

From the introduction of Gemstone we move on moment by moment through the burglary, the coverup, the coverup of the coverup and finally, Nixon's resignation. By that point, almost any reader will concede that Lukas has documented his case. The denoument is the celebrated "smoking gun" -- the text of the tape of Nixon's conversation on June 23, 1972.

"What made the tape so damaging," says Lukas, "was ... the plain, irrefutable language which showed that six days after the Watergate burglary the President of the United States knew a great deal about the break-in, realized that Liddy and [E. Howard] Hunt had been involved, recognized Mitchell's probable complicity, personally ordered a cover-up of the facts, and used the CIA and the FBI to protect his personal political interests."

Watergate was a tragedy, of course, and any honest account is bound to make pretty sordid reading. But at the end, one can find uplift. For however many people behaved badly, quite a lot of people behaved well: famously Eliot Richardson, who resigned as Attorney General rather than fire Archibald Cox; perhaps more subtly Congressman Peter W. Rodino, Jr., who succeeded (at no small efort) in keeping the House hearings decent and honorable; more surprisingly Congressman Lawrence Hogan, conservative Republican from Maryland who upstaged some of his more liberal colleagues by declaring for impeachment (he was offended at what Nixon had done to the FBI). And I'd even save a kind word for Hugh W. Sloan, Jr., a campaign staffer who did, concededly, take part in some of the money-sloshing, but who in the end refused to go along with the coverup.

Woodward and Bernstein have their place in Watergate history, if not nearly as great as their own (well--Woodward's) self-promotion would suggest. If they did not originate much in the way of real Watergate news, they did a great deal to keep the topic on the agenda. But their project also did a great deal of long-term harm, helping to facilitate the growth of a climate of "client journalism" where reporters get cozy with sources and manipulate the process as much as any active participant. Tony Lukas died far too young (and a suicide). As a monmument, he leaves a body of exemplary journalism, of which this is a capstone.

Reading "Essence of Decision" resonates with Kurosawa, or maybe Stoppard. We have a central story - one of the great non-events in human history, the moment when the Soviet Union and the United States "came eyeball to eyeball" (as Dean Rusk is said to have said) before someone blinked. We hear it three times: one, from the standpoint of the "rational actor;" second from the internal logic of organizations; and third, from the perspective of politics where people more or less rub along together.

It's an event that bears retelling and, with qualification, the device works. The upshot is that we get some insight into the missile crisis. But not at all incidentally, we get some insight into the academic study of politics (I resist calling it "political science"), and a whiff of what it might have to offer for our better understanding of the world.

Aside from the Kurusowa effect, there is another structural innovation. We have, in a sense, two books interleaved, like Faulkner's "Wild Palms." The even-numbered chapters tell (and retell) the basic story. The odd-numbered chapters offer a framework of "theory."

I suppose you might read just the even-numbered chapters - indeed the authors themselves suggest as much, though rather half-heartedly. And indeed, the odd-numbered chapters can be heavy going. One cannot help recalling the old canard about the sociologist as a person who gets a government research grant to find the bordello next door. You are tempted to say that their theory is what sophisticated people know anyway, and the clueless will probably never figure out.

But there is an answer to this dismissal. That is: most (or at least) a lot of history gets told from the standpoint of the "rational actor." A survey of the competing approaches makes it clear just what this approach leaves out. And if the polyphonic approach is so obviously superior to the single narrative line, then why have historians from Thucydides to Henry Kissinger been willing to do without it? One answer might be: for all their talents, they simply haven't learned the way to tell a story in any other way.

So on the whole, retelling works. But not, perhaps, as well as it might. Another reviewer has said that this isn't really a case to illustrate "organization" theory here because this is not a case that highlights organizations - rather, at least for the United States, the response to the Cuban missile crisis was the work of a small group of men, working together in close cooperation. There is some merit to this view: concededly, you do not get the clash of bull elephants that you might have got at another time when Defense makes war on State, and both work together to fend of Intelligence. But you get a taste of it: we find that the Joint Chiefs were most hospitable to an invasion; that State thought that maybe we could talk it through; and that John McCone from the CIA was the one person who most clearly anticipated the threat. Moreover, you see the "organization" problem in a somewhat different light, when you see how the President's orders were massaged or modified by the military (sometimes, even, within the military).

But perhaps in any event, I need not get too distracted by the framework. Along the way, there are any number of nuggets that stand pretty well on their own. I liked in particular, for instance, the discussion of the role of committee work. We tend to stick up our nose at any project done by committee. But, argue our authors, in World War II it was Churchill, high-handed as he was, who worked through committee-and virtually always followed the committee's advice. The "strong leader" who kept things close to his vest, was Hitler.

But more generally - I was already an adult at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, and I remember it well. Specifically, I remember how frightened were so many people in my surroundings. I wasn't that frightened; I figured that one way or another, we would rub along. In the end, of course, I was right - we did rub along. But I think in retrospect, it was I who was kidding myself and the Nervous Nellies who had the right attitude. We did rub along, but as Wellington said about the Battle of Waterloo, it was a near thing. I particularly like Robert Kennedy:

"The fourteen people [in the American inner circle] were very significant-bright, able, dedicated people, all of whom had the greatest affection for the U.S. ... If six of them had been President of the U.S., I think that the world might have been blown up."

[Final technical note: one or more of the other reviews appear to be discussing the first edition of this book. The (current) seocnd edition is not a mere cosmetic update, but substantially a new book].

Amazing to find this marvellous three-volume set is listed as out of print -- although it does seem to be available at the Amazon UK site. In any event, I think this work has perhaps better claim than any other for discrediting Marxism as an intellectual movement, recharacterizing it as a theology or (perhaps better) a theodicy. The whole set is superb, but seen in this light, perhaps the most important part is the first chapter on "the origins of dialectic." "Marx's thought," K explains, "would be emptied of its content if it were not considered in the setting of European cultural history as a whole, as an answer to certain fundamental questions that philosophers have posed for centuries in one form or another." K thus identifies "philosophic interest" as centering "on the limitations and misery of the human condition--not its obvious, tangible and remediable forms, but the fundametnal impoverishment which cannot be cured by technical devices and which, when once apprehended, was felt to be the cause of man's more obvius, empirical deficiencies, the latter being mere secondary phenomena." Taking this premise and starting with Plotinus, it takes K just 60-odd pages of leaps and swoops to reach Hegel and his dialectic -- "an account," as K calls the dialectic, "of the historical process whereby consciousness overcomes its own contingency and finitude by constant self-differentiation." K is this positioned to move forward through the Hegelian left and on to the young Marx. Having situated Marx in this grand tradition of philosophical thought, then (and only then), K is ready to situate him in the narrower arena of European socialism.

K's second volume is a closer and more specific reading of Marxism in "The Golden Age," which takes him (inter alia) through a great variety of names now mostly forgotten except among specialists (the Poles in particular are likely to be unfamiliar to readers in the United States). This section volume is admirable on its own terms, although perhaps less distinctive or memorable than the first.

The final volume, on "The Breakdown" is the one closest to the author's own time and thus the one perhaps most in need of revision. Names like Gramsci and Lukacs certainly belong in the permanent record, though almost anything K had to say about them is bound to need nuance from later research and analysis. Names like Korsch and Goldmann begin to take on some of the flavor of quaint antiquity.

But that kind of difficulty can hardly be avoided and certainly does nothing to impugne the greater merits of the set as a whole. This is a work for the ages, and in a better world, it would remain in print where it deserves to be.

Andre Malraux wrote that only three books -- Robinson Crusoe, Don Quixote and The Idiot--retained their truth for those who had seen prisons and concentration camps (see: Les Noys de l'Altenburg (Paris 1948)). It's an odd remark--what did he mean, "seen"? Suffered in? Or watched newsreel footage on the History Channel? One cannot escape the conviction that Malraux is trying to hype the aroma of glamour around his own life.

But this is a distraction. The question is: I wonder what he thinks of the extraordinary array of "witness literature" from Europe beginning, perhaps, with Dostoevsky's "House of the Dead" and ending (one may hope?) with Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago."

In this chorus, Aleksander Wat's "My Century" stands as a luminous example. Wat was a Pole: Jewish by background but at last a convert to Christianity. He was a poet and a "literary person" before and after World War II. Along the way, he spent time in 13 (or was it 14?) different prisons, all simply for being who he was."

His "memoir" is not precisely something he "wrote." Wat spent the year 1964-5 in Berkeley. There he fell in with Czeslaw Milosz, a great poet in his own right. Largely with the encouragement of Milosz, he "dictated" his story in a series of interviews which have been somewhat recast for this book. It's just as harrowing as you would expect it to be it has its uplifting side, driven by Wat's amazing inner resouurces: one thing about a good education, it gives you stuff to think about in Prison. And even at the worst, his sense of humor does not fail him. He recounts the story of the citizens of Bukhara, who surrendered to Ghengis Khan--only to have Ghengis Khan order their massacre. As Ghengis Khan explained to the elders:

"You must have sinned greatly against God if he sent Ghengis Khan down on you!"

Aside from Wat's own story, the NYRB edition includes an astonishing narrative by his wife, recounting a particularly dreadful chapter in her own prison years.

There is a promising-looking biography by Tomas Venclova, but I haven't read it. Wat died in 1967, I believe (though I can't seem to pin this down) a suicide.

Two ways to guess Sandbaggers' age, or mine. One: it is the last series in my experience that features telephone cords. No cellulars, no wrist radios; indeed none of that high-tech gadgetry that figures to prominently in another spy series best left unnamed. Two: this is the last series for which my wife and I used to leave parties early. That is to say, the last before we got a VCR, and what a delight it is to find that this best of all TV dramas has moved on to videotape, and now to DVD.

When I say best, I mean it. I'm picky about my TV. I do like a few of the big intricate series numbers: Hill Street Blues, and then Northern Exposure and then -- well actually, then not a lot until the Sopranos. Sandbaggers is the only one that I willingly go back and re-watch again and again (for the Sopranos, we'll have to wait and see).

For diehards, there is a serviceable fan site (maybe the only one I've ever checked in on): see www.opsroom.org. A recent post by (producer) Ian Mackintosh's brother recalls how the series ended abruptly with Macintosh's disappearance in a small plane over Alaska -- and raises the possibility that it might have been more than just a simple misfortune.

This is such a good book that one should be careful not to be distracted by its shortcomings.

Part of the challenge is making sure one is clear just what it intends to be. It is not a general history of brutality and mass murder in the 20th Century. Heaven knows there is too much of that for any one book: and Power leaves out any number of primary contenders - Stalin, Mao, Idi Amin, not to say Pinochet and the Central American Death Squads. She does discuss half a dozen or so major mass crimes, but even here, she makes no pretense of offering a comprehensive narrative. Rather, she chooses her episodes to show either (first) the development of the concept of genocide or (second) the response of the West, and in particular the United States, to the challenge some particular episodes presented. For no extra charge, she throws in an extraordinary brief biography of the strange, difficult, obsessive Raphael Lemkin-the man who can be characterized, without any real exaggeration, as having invented the concept of genocide, even to the point of fashioning its name.

The episodes that do get her attention are: Cambodia, Rwanda, Iraq, and Yugoslavia - that last, three times. The reviewer can scarcely summarize the array of misconduct that she puts on review: suffice it to say you won't be humming the tunes of this one on the way out of the theatre. The misconduct of the direct actors - murder, mayhem, rape and more - is quite enough in itself. The extra dose is the persistent inaction or half-hearted action of those who might have responded.

A good deal of this will be familiar to anyone who has carefully followed the news over the last generation-although heaven knows, one can be excused for trying to forget. A couple of particular items struck me as new. Example: power argues that "poison gas" may not have been the worst of Saddam's crimes against the Kurds (in 1988) - but that it was the one that provoked the most indignation because it harkened back to World War I and thus engaged the imagination of the West. In the same vein, concentration camps may not have been the worst of the evils in Bosnia - but it provoked the most indignation because it harkened back to World War II.

A perhaps more meaningful point: Power makes much of the fact that we sought to excuse away inaction in Bosnia on the proposition that it was a "tragedy" generated from "ancient hatreds." It was nothing of the sort, in Power's view: it was a campaign (and not that easy a campaign) conceived and executed by real people in real time. This is a point of great importance. I am not certain that she makes her case. But it certainly is a central issue, and she is quite right to direct our attention to it.

Given such plenitude, what more could one want? Here is a suggestion: given the almost distinctive range and depth of her experience, I would have loved to see her give more thought to what might have worked better and why. This would have required, I suspect, a good deal more analysis than she is disposed to provide. To take just one example-the various "genocides" that she discusses, while perhaps all equally "evil" (who cares about ranking here?), are also, one from another, rather different. Pol Pot in Cambodia ran a campaign of extermination based on ideology, perhaps on class. The Rwandans who murdered 800,000 Tutsis acted on (ancient?) ethnic hatred. The Serbs who sought to push around the Bosnians and the Kosovars acted on ethnic of class motives - and while there was no shortage of brutality, they seemed more interested in displacing people than in actual murder. So also Saddam with the Kurds: he apparently intended to punish them (for cooperating with Iran) and probably to drive them from their homes, but it is not clear that he intended to exterminate them.

As I say, I am not trying to set up a rank ordering of evil here: I am suggesting that different problems probably require different responses and I would have liked to have heard more from Power about what might have worked where.

Indeed, I will generalize this point. Power is quick to suggest that the West (particularly the United States) could have done this, could have done that. She is right enough in the abstract. She itemizes a baffling array of excuses posed in the path of action. Again she is right. Still, the fact remains that not all courses of action are equally viable: some are more likely to work than others, some cost more than others, for some the cost may be truly unacceptable.

Her defenders will answer that this is a job for generals and presidents, not for journalists. True only so far. Power probably has as much experience with the problem as anyone alive. We need her views not only on what went wrong, but also on what might go right.

Footnote: other reviewers have accused Power of telling lies about the Armenians. I'm really not the best judge of that. I tend to believe her, but I'm not really competent to argue the point. But here is a suggestion: if you think she is (or might be) wrong about the Armenians, skip that chapter. It is interesting as a matter of history, but has nothing to do with the core of her narrative.

Someone (perhaps it was I) has said that bankruptcy is corporate finance with negative signs. This has always been true but it is amazing how far mainstream finance has gone to try to resist the comparison. The resistance must be, must have been more cultural than economic, because it is axiomatic that anything is a bargain at the right price, and that there is no more or less money to be made in "distress investing" than in any other. Two generations ago, there seems to have been only one person in American that really understood this point - the late Max Heine, who made his grubstake by investing in out-of-favor railroad bonds in the Great Depression, and then riding the wave of prosperity that emerged in World War II. In the same vein, 40 years ago just about any bankruptcy judge would have looked on an "assigned claim" as some kind of monster.

Times have changed. Now everybody's an arbitrageur. The "vulture investors" have their conferences, their social clubs, and for all I know, their own softball team.

Stuart C. Gilson"s "Corporate Restructuring" symbolizes the sea change from the old attitude to the new. It adds the imprimatur of the Harvard Business School to the notion that vulture investing is just another way of making money. As others have noted, this isn't a work of high theory - indeed it has a kind of slapdash, direct-off-the-photocopier feel that is remarkably common in business publications. For fancy theory, you look elsewhere - in law to the likes of Douglas Baird or Lucian Arye Bebchuk; in finance to the developing lore of "real options." But the case studies are an excellent device for getting a sense of the texture and possibilities of vulture investing. It can be read with profit alongside Hilary Rosenberg's "The Vulture Investors." Ambitious students who want the full theoretical framework will match it with David G. Luenberger's "Investment Science." But Gilson's work has merit on its own as one kind of introduction to this revolution in investment thinking.

The chances are that "Phineas Finn" will not be the first or the second or even the third Trollope novel that you read. Several Barsetshire novels and "The Way We Live Now" are likely to get pride of place. This is probably fair enough. But that fact says more about the merits of the other books than of any defect in "Phineas Finn." It isn't perfect, but it is a very satisfying novel, indeed - perhaps the best "political" novel since Disraeli's "Sybil," It is "political," that is, not in the sense that it tackles big issues, as "Sybil" does - "Phineas Finn" gives a once-over to voting rights, tenant rights and the Irish but it's all somewhat perfunctory. No: it is "political" in the sense that it is about the lives and fortunes of a public man, and of those who offer help or hindrance on the way.

The core elements of the plot are fairly familiar: callow youth sets out to conquer the world and finds out that it's trickier than it looks. Impetuous young woman enters into marriage full of high hopes only to find out that she is stuck with a bad deal. But then, you don't read Shakespeare for plot. I wouldn't say that Trollope is Shakespeare. Still, it is impressive how much by way of character and situation both writes can milk out of a structure that is almost haphazard.

Other commentators have also noted that the ending to "Phineas Finn" is weak, but I don't see that as a crippling vice: I'm hard put to think of a really good novel whose ending is not weak.

One of the many notable facts about the cast of characters is its great range: we have the home folk in Ireland. We have a marvelous portrait of Finn's landlord, the law-copyist, and his employer, the successful barrister - in each case, along with their wives. We have a narrow-minded country squire and a feckless young playboy. And we have a sketch, brief and incomplete but still convincing, of the grandest peer in the realm.

Aside from the sheer breadth of reach, the other thing to be said about the cast is the extraordinary range of interesting women. Phineas, devil that he may be, catches the fancy of at least one back home in Ireland and three more in London. Trollope is often good with women and here in particular he shows remarkable sympathy and comprehension of what they are up against. And not least of the three is, of course, the remarkable Madame Max Goesler, who is surely in contention for recognition as the most remarkable Trollope character at all-for a lady named Max with a touch of a moustache, she is a Victorian sexpot.

It would be fun to read this in comparison with Henry Adams' "Democracy" another novel of politics in more or less the same period, though on another continent. Meantime, I'm clearing time to read the rest of Trollope's "political" novels, in the hope that he maintains the high standard that he has set here.

Here is a small point with a larger purpose: Virginia Woolf does not know Boeuf en Daube. Or at any rate, Mrs. Ramsay, the heroine of "To the Lighthouse," does not, and there is no suggestion of any irony in her thought on the topic:

"Everything depended upon things being served up to the precise moment they were ready. ... To keep it waiting was out of the question. Yet of course tonight, of all nights, out they went, and they came in late, and things had to be sent out, things had to be kept hot; the Boeuf en Daube would be entirely spoilt."

Well, if you know anything about the kitchen, you know that this is nonsense. Boeuf en Daube is probably the last thing that needs to be "served up to the precise moment ..." As Elizabeth David says in her "French Provincial Cooking:" "there must be scores of different recipes for daubes in Provence alone... essentially a country housewife's dish." And more to the point, per Ms. David:

"The daube is a useful dish for those who have to get a dinner party when they get home from the office. It can be cooked for 1  hours the previous evening and finished on the night itself. Provided they have not been overcooked to start with, these beef and wine stews are all the better for a second or even third heating up."

I wonder how many English majors from the 1950s sold their souls for a good Boeuf en Daube (did Sylvia Plath have the recipe?) - and how much better off they would have been if they'd seen through it: understood that Mrs. Ramsay did not get the point, because Ms. Woolf did not get the point. Indeed, strictly speaking, the creation is not Mrs. Ramsay's at all, but you'd have to be a sharp-eyed reader to catch on: it is the servant who does the work and delivers the finished product and she, I suspect, knows better than her mistress how flexible and compliant it may be. There is an irony here and it is lost, I suspect, on the mistress and on the mistress' creator.

All of which leads to a larger point: Virginia Woolf does not know servants. Instance in particular her observation of Mrs. McNab, the old char who comes to reopen the summer house after long disuse. We get an elaborate set-piece description of Mrs. McNab, and it is not pretty: indeed, it is mean-spirited and dismissive in almost every way. Mrs. McNab "lurches" and "leers" She "was witless and she knew it;" she sings "like the voice of witlessness." Now, if this is true, it is inexcusably rude: one may want, for some artistic purpose, to show her lurching and leering for, but here it serves no purpose, unless you count its actual function in throwing light on the author. Anyway, the chances are it is not true. My guess is that Mrs. McNab has operated under far more constraint in life than either Ms. Woolf or Mrs. Ramsay ever dreamed of. Witless people do not survive under the iron whim of a Mrs. Ramsay; poor chars who do learn to survive will find that it takes all the skill one can muster.

I could go on, but I need to stay within Amazon's 1,000 word limit. The point is not that "To the Lighthouse" is a bad book. It's actually quite a good book; or at least it is a book full of good paragraphs, and Virginia Woolf seemingly cannot write a bad paragraph. It is as bad novel, because Virginia Woolf has little of the capacity for imaginative empathy that makes a really good novelist. They say that Shakespeare stands as a void at the center of his plays because he has poured every part of his being into his characters. Virginia Woolf takes almost all of her characters into herself. It is well done, but often we get to know more than we really want to know.