'The difficulties of turning Greek comedy into English verse are enormous (...), and the variety of metres used by Aristophanes adds considerably to the difficulties. H. translates Aristophanes' iambic trimeters into the unrhymed pentameters standard with Shakespeare and Milton, even though it is never easy to cramp the twelve or more syllables of a Greek line into the ten of its English equivalent. Iambic and trochaic tetrameters are turned into correspondingly longer but at times more loosely stressed English iambic verses. For the lyrics H. chooses unrhymed free verse (...). H.' s style is lively, modern, and generally effective, closer perhaps in its presentation of the complexities of Aristophanic detail and reference than most of its rivals. Throughout the four plays in this volume H. bases his translations on the best available texts and commentaries. He is virtually always accurate without being over-literal, and far more often graphically idiomatic than flat. He has an enviable knack in the anglicization of puns and verbal jokes. Oaths and curses are transformed into acceptable modern equivalents. (...) The value of these translations, however, is increased by a superb and long general introduction which sets Aristophanes' careeer in its context and ranges, always relevantly, far and wide: dramatic production, the dynamics of Aristophanic fantasy, Nachleben, the translator's problems. (...) There are excellent introductions too to the individual plays, founded on modern scholarship and independent evaluation.(...). H., however, would have benefitted from having his translation of Birds vetted by an ornithologist (...).' (GEOFFREY W. ARNOTT in Greece & Rome, 1998, pp.226-27). From the library of the late Prof. W. Geoffrey Arnott.