"M. L. West, a Fellow of All Souls College Oxford, a veritable Ivory Tower for scholars of the highest calibre, is simply the greatest living authority on Archaic Greek Poetry and culture. His scholarly output is truly pantagruelic in quantity and astounding in quality, although, naturally, it has created as much controversy as it has elicited admiration (it could not have been otherwise for somebody who has strong and often obstinate views and is generally described as a sui generis personality). His work on the Orphics touches on one of the most obscure branches of Greek poetry and on a corpus of texts that ranges from the Archaic age to Late Antiquity. No one interested in the field can afford to ignore West. "

~ Petrides Antonis (originally posted on Amazon in February 2005)