Mailer’s _Barbary Shore_, which is not a part of any of the three post-war trends, displays the novelist’s function as a historian in its retelling of the story of the Russian Revolution. A twenty-page account and eulogy are followed by a description of the revolution’s failure to spread and its consequent nationalization. Lovett also recounts his discipleship under Trotsky before he goes on to list the forces which created a police state instead of a promised land. THE CONTINENT AND ELSEWHERE =Joseph Conrad: Colonial Politics and Revolution= Joseph Conrad’s _Nostromo_ (1904) may be read as a history if one interprets it as a typical case of government-making by foreign industrial interests in late-nineteenth-century South America. With the American Holroyd as his silent partner and financial backer, British-educated Charles Gould uses the wealth of his San Tomas silver mine to finance the successful revolt of Occidental Province from the Republic of Costaguana, which is in the grip of the tyrannical Montero brothers. A good deal of actual history is injected through the reminiscences of old Giorgio Viola, who had fought under Garibaldi across South America to Italy. But it was in _The Secret Agent_ and _Under Western Eyes_ that Conrad recorded more memorable history. Both books give extensive accounts of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary activities. A superb artist, Conrad did not need to go to a series of actual events and people. His imaginative synthesis of the factors which produce them created, however, a true pattern of this whole complex of revolutionary activity. Besides the sensitive exploration of the characters of Razumov, Nathalia, and Victorovitch, one finds actions which characterized the movement in which they were swept up. Conrad presents the espionage and counter-espionage, the bomb plots, and the abortive revolts. Though he wrote out of revulsion at revolutionary activity, his point of view did not blind him to the miseries of Czarist Russia. With artistic integrity, he described the repressive commissions, their imprisonments, exiles, and executions. His account of the fate of Mikulin, chief of Czarist counter-espionage, makes extremely interesting reading in 1954. For Mikulin one could almost substitute Koestler’s Rubashov: