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.

Peter Russell, born in Bristol in 1921, was editor of the influential magazine `Nine' (1945-56). He left England in the early 1960s, and lived and taught in Germany, the USA, Canada, Iran and Italy, which was his main home since 1964. His many books include `An Examination of Ezra Pound'(ed., 1950) and `All for the Wolves: Selected Poems 1947-1975', published by Anvil in 1984.