746 Reviews this; and Craig explores, interestingly enough, the characters of Rosse and Lenox to suggest that 'Machiavellians' do 'not all get their just come-uppance'. 'Lenox's Machiavellian duplicity', however, is in the 'service of something beside just his own survival and prosperity, and it is this that we approve' (p. 47). Does it follow, though, that 'Good is the ultimate source of everything' (p. 52)? Furthermore, in what sense is it 'philosophical' to trade in assumptions?bordering on the banal, notwithstanding their casuistical perils?such as 'to be fully natural is to be alive, and to be fullyalive is to be awake, living with one's eyes open as it were' (p. 110)? The book returns, in its conclusion, to the 'governing thesis': Shakespeare was 'cognizant of the larger philosophical questions' and 'crafted his dramas with the intention of showing how these questions rise out of, and bear upon, his stories'; the 'reader' thus 'experiences philosophy arising "naturally"', as in Plato's dialogues, out of the 'pursuit of answers to the problems and questions and perplexities implicit in ordinary political life' (p. 193). Yet Of Philosophers and Kings is a defining example of how not to philosophize: it induces a nostalgia for the 'high theory', now spectral, that is, curiously, the indistinct object of Craig's iconoclasm. University of the West of England Peter Rawlings Jonathan Swift and Popular Culture: Myth, Media, and the Man. By Ann Cline Kelly. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave. 2002. xi + 244 pp. ?32.50. ISBN 0-312-23959-9. This highly entertaining and enjoyable book is one that I will be putting on my undergraduate reading list immediately. Apart fromwhat it has to say about Swift, the book is as good an exemplar as one could hope to find of the aesthetics and politics of reception. In the excellent finalchapter on Swift as an 'epic hero', that is to say,as Irish patriot who symbolizes all the best qualities ofhis nation, Kelly writes that post-1949: Swift usually stands forno particular political agenda, but is invoked as a totem of generalized Irish greatness. An exception proves the rule: a paraphrase of Swift's (literally) incendiary statement (in the Universal Use ofIrish Manufacture), 'Burn everythingEng? lish but their coal,' continues to be used as the IRA motto. Notwithstanding, in 1978 a new Irish ten-pound was issued, featuringa portraitofSwift, behind which is the section of Swift's will that bequeathed money to build a mental hospital in Dublin. (pp. 177-78) Difficult to find a more striking example than that of the complexities of cultural appropriation. The firsthalf of the book is a literary biography of Swift driven by the hypothesis that 'Swift's extraordinary celebrity results from several canny decisions he made about managing his career as an author' (p. 1), to which I would respond that Swift did not have a 'career as an author'. He had a career, and a very unsatisfactory one, as a Church of Ireland clergyman. If he had been even cannier about managing his career as an author, he would have had a much better career as a clergyman, because the most plausible hypothesis for Swift's failure to gain the English Episcopal See that was the summit of his early ambition was the revulsion feltby Queen Anne forA Tale of a Tub. Of course, if Swift's career as a clergyman had been better, his career as an author would probably have ended; because as most of his biographers say in one way or another, his muse was disappointed discontentment. It will be clear that I do not 'buy' Ann Cline Kelly's biographical premiss that Swift was driven by the Hollywood adage that any publicity is good publicity and that the main intention behind everything he did and everything he wrote was to keep his image in the public eye?to manipulate consciously his fame or notoriety, MLR, 99.3, 2004 747 deliberately acting ambiguously (with respect to women, forexample) to keep gossip circulating. Whatever Swift was, or was not, he was not so simple as this reductive premiss makes him out to be. Nor was he more successful than any other complex writer...