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During the summer of 1965, when Paul Roazen was in England gathering background material on the history of psychoanalysis, Geoffrey Gorer, ‘an exceptionally intelligent commentator on British psychoanalysis’, suggested he meet Edward Glover (, p. 5). That summer Glover granted Roazen ‘nine separate interviews’. They subsequently met twice again when Roazen ‘returned to London in the fall of 1966’ and thereafter ‘exchanged some friendly correspondence’ (p. 6). Roazen found him an ‘unusually gentle’, ‘nice’ and ‘sweet’ man and, according to Roazen, it was this personal contact which is responsible for the ‘inevitably subjective component in this report of [his] encounter with Glover’ (pp. 6 & 1). But Roazen was also prompted to write his book after stumbling upon a significant collection of Glover's letters and other related material at the Library of Congress (p. xxxiii). Oedipus in Britain is, therefore, constructed out of a melding of ‘oral’ and ‘documentary’ history clustered around a short biographical study of a man who ‘was one of the great publicists for psychoanalysis in the English language’, had an ‘international stature’ in the psychoanalytic movement, and was, for many years, the ‘left hand’ of Ernest Jones (pp. xxxii, 78, 91).
Roazen offers his readers fragments of his transcriptions of the detailed notes he took from his interviews with Glover in the mid-1960s. But Roazen has also interspersed that important oral history text with his own ‘asides’ (‘enclosed within parentheses’) (p. 4). This ‘editorial’ information, mostly gleaned subsequent to the interviews, is often of great interest but I am not convinced that Roazen should have used it in this way. I found his constant editorializing unnecessarily intrusive of Glover's story and therefore detracting from the potential value of reading something of Roazen's original account of Glover's own oral late-life autobiographical reflections. But these personal meetings, and subsequent correspondence, have a