This work of biography—miraculous in its way, and very much more than a biography—should be obligatory reading for every psychiatrist under 50 years of age, and for every psychoanalyst of any age.

On a recent visit I paid to the Quirinale, Italy's presidential palace in Rome, this book on Masud Khan came to mind for me, because of the impact of the images—revolutionary, bewildering, inventive, subversive— all characteristic of the art of the new century and its intellectual upheaval following Freud. The very same adjectives, admixed with their less attractive meanings, come to mind when one thinks of Masud Khan and his luxuriant engagement with psychoanalysis, central to this book. This biography is not just the story of one man, but a work of scholarship and voluminous research concerning the psychoanalytic community in post-1945 Britain and France, that dominated psychiatry in North America until the century ended.