Aeschylus' 'Suppliants' dramatises the myth of the fifty daughters of Danaos, who flee Egypt and come to Argos as suppliants, trying to escape forced marriage to their Egyptian cousins. It was long considered to be the earliest surviving tragedy. Even after the mid-20th century, when new evidence established a later date for the play, critics tended to condemn it for its alleged 'archaic' features. As a result it has long been underestimated, although a careful examination reveals it to be one of the most exciting tragedies. This companion employs a variety of critical approaches to set the play in its literary, dramatic, social and historical contexts, and also offers a thorough examination of the performance of the tragedy, investigating topics such as stage, action, music, song and dance.

Gu Weijun, a.k.a. Wellington Koo (1887-1985). Born in Shanghai and raised in the city's International Settlement, Koo became fluent in English during his postgraduate studies abroad - he got a PhD in Law from Columbia in 1912. He was recalled soon afterwards to become the English Secretary to the newly formed Republic of China, and became ambassador to the United States in 1915. He achieved notoriety at the Paris Peace Conference where he sternly resisted Japanese attempts to hold onto seized German colonial territory in mainland China. In protest at their treatment, the Chinese were the only delegates not to sign the subsequent Treaty of Versailles. Koo was China's first representative to the League of Nations, and ended up as acting president of Republican China during the unrest of the period 1926-7. He subsequently served briefly as a Foreign Minister during the peak of the Warlord Era, before returning to Europe, first as a delegate at the League of Nations, and then as China's ambassador to France. With the Nazi occupation, Koo fled to Britain, where he became the Chinese ambassador to the UK until 1946. A founder member of the United Nations, Koo was instrumental in maintaining the position of Republican China on the Security Council -by this time, 'Republican China' was limited solely to the island of Taiwan, while the Communists proclaimed themselves to be the new rulers of China itself. Retiring from the diplomatic service in 1956, the venerable Koo went on to become a judge at the International Court of Justice at the Hague, rising to vice-president before his retirement, aged 80, in 1967. He settled in New York, where his final years were tormented by 'Republican' China's loss of its seat on the United Nations Security Council to the Communists, following Nixon's famous visit to China.

Col. Bonsal's confidential notes & diary, published with the encouragement of Pres. Wilson, depict the hopeless complexities of making peace among the small nations previously absorbed in the three former European empires at the end of WW1.

Includes "List of books indexed" (published also separately)

A landmark work of narrative history, Paris 1919 is the first full-scale treatment of the Peace Conference in more than twenty-five years. It offers a scintillating view of those dramatic and fateful days when much of the modern world was sketched out, when countries were created—Iraq, Yugoslavia, Israel—whose troubles haunt us still. Winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize • Winner of the PEN Hessell Tiltman Prize • Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize Between January and July 1919, after “the war to end all wars,” men and women from around the world converged on Paris to shape the peace. Center stage, for the first time in history, was an American president, Woodrow Wilson, who with his Fourteen Points seemed to promise to so many people the fulfillment of their dreams. Stern, intransigent, impatient when it came to security concerns and wildly idealistic in his dream of a League of Nations that would resolve all future conflict peacefully, Wilson is only one of the larger-than-life characters who fill the pages of this extraordinary book. David Lloyd George, the gregarious and wily British prime minister, brought Winston Churchill and John Maynard Keynes. Lawrence of Arabia joined the Arab delegation. Ho Chi Minh, a kitchen assistant at the Ritz, submitted a petition for an independent Vietnam. For six months, Paris was effectively the center of the world as the peacemakers carved up bankrupt empires and created new countries. This book brings to life the personalities, ideals, and prejudices of the men who shaped the settlement. They pushed Russia to the sidelines, alienated China, and dismissed the Arabs. They struggled with the problems of Kosovo, of the Kurds, and of a homeland for the Jews. The peacemakers, so it has been said, failed dismally; above all they failed to prevent another war. Margaret MacMillan argues that they have unfairly been made the scapegoats for the mistakes of those who came later. She refutes received ideas about the path from Versailles to World War II and debunks the widely accepted notion that reparations imposed on the Germans were in large part responsible for the Second World War. Praise for Paris 1919 “It’s easy to get into a war, but ending it is a more arduous matter. It was never more so than in 1919, at the Paris Conference. . . . This is an enthralling book: detailed, fair, unfailingly lively. Professor MacMillan has that essential quality of the historian, a narrative gift.” —Allan Massie, The Daily Telegraph (London)

Zeitlin explores the diversity and complexity of these interactions through the most influential literary texts of the archaic and classical periods, from epic (Homer) and didactic poetry (Hesiod) to the productions of tragedy and comedy in fifth-century Athens.