Current Issue: May - June 2026
PN Review 289

In this issue:

Horatio Morpurgo - Stefan Zweig and the Mad King
Wong May - Two Poems
Rod Mengham - Layering the Landscape in Krakow
Irvin Desir - A selection prepared by John Robert Lee
Rory Waterman - Declan Ryan in conversation with Rory Waterman
David Herman - on Philip Roth: Stung by Life
Al-khansā - Deathsongs translated by James E. Montgomery

Current Issue: May - June 2026
PN Review 289

Stefan Zweig and the Mad King Horatio Morpurgo Two copies of the Sonderfahndungsliste GB – the only two – were retrieved in September 1945 from a wrecked government building in central Berlin. Dated 1940, this ‘Special Search List’ named individuals to be arrested should the invasion of Britain succeed. It is a draft plan for cultural and political decapitation: Bertrand Russell, Sylvia Pankhurst, Winston Churchill, E.M. Forster. Penguin’s recent title Germany: What Next? is cited and the company marked down for a visit. After its publication in the Guardian, Rebecca West described the list to Noel Coward as ‘the people we would have been seen dead with’. what was, to some, an occasion for the exercise of sparkling wits, was for others too late. The prospect of Nazi victory had plunged both Virginia Woolf and Stefan Zweig into depression from which they saw no......
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Current Issue: May - June 2026
PN Review 289

Two Poems Wong May Words

1.

The word ‘slice’ makes one salivate.
You think of all the good times in your life.
The happy times

But what cake?
To whom do I owe the pleasure?
......
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Current Issue: May - June 2026
PN Review 289

Layering the Landscape in Krakow Rod Mengham There are four artificial mounds on the outskirts of Krakow – two are ancient and two modern. The Krakus mound was supposedly constructed to house the remains of the city’s legendary founder. It predates the Christian era. The Wanda mound was erected a few centuries later to commemorate the heroism of a Christian princess reputed to have drowned herself in the nearby Vistula rather than succumb to marriage with a pagan chieftain. The Kosciuszko and Pilsudski mounds enshrine the heroic examples of the nineteenth-century revolutionary internationalist Tadeusz Kosciuszko and twentieth-century nationalist leader Jozef Pilsudski. In September of this year I took part in the ‘Layered Landscapes’ conference at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. I talked about the layers of meaning that can be applied to English fields. As soon as the last session had ended, I crossed the city ring......
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