42 SOCIAL SCIENTIST instances Leask notices 'signs' of a cultural and geographical Other which accompanies the expansion—though not exclusively eastwards—of British imperial power. But such 'signs' are not unambiguous, or in Said's sense, totalized. They are rather—and this is the main burden of Leask's thesis—subject to two distinct yet somehow complementary interpretations. In the first place these signs support and authenticate the metropolitan culture's claim to superiority. Secondly, and collateral with the first, they also, and in equal measure express an unease about the certitude of these claims. This ambivalence is common to Byron with his maverick Whiggery displaced in the Ottoman middle east, Shelley the radical democrat who finds his site in an unenlightened India and the Tory free-trade exponents Coleridge and De Quincey who find their Xanadu in China. Leask's selection of authors is obviously well considered. If these authors encompass a range of elitist political choices in Regency England, then their texts range the expanse of British empire from Greece and Turkey in the West to China in the Far East. Divided into three nearly autonomous sections and preceded by a methodological introduction British Writers And the East begins with Byron's Eastern Tales. Whether it is 'The Giaour', 'The Bridge of Abydos or 'The Corsair', Byron, according to Leask, undertakes a threefold enactment. To begin with, the 'imperial self (whether a European hero in Greece or West Asia or an Oriental Surrogate of the metropolitan hero) is reduced to a level with the Oriental Other. However, this reduction, or the rhetoric thereof, which amounts to an elective affinity (whether political, cultural or heterosexual) never quite succeeds in overcoming the difference between the same and the other. The failure brings Leask to the second movement in Byron's Tales. The fact of failure re-affirms and perpetuates the radical difference between the colonising metropolis and the colonized periphery. The third movement of the Tales is this ceaseless oscillation between a (rhetorical/aesthetic) critique of the premises that enable empire and a sub-textual capitulation before the dominant binarism of Orient and Occident which resists erasure. The case of Shelley presents a somewhat different problematic. Despite his inclination towards a radical democratic politics at home, Shelley's view of empire and the East are unusually conservative. In 'Alastor', 'Prometheus Unbound' and 'The Revolt of Islam' Shelley translates British imperialism into a displaced form of revolutionary politics. The ideal of universal enlightenment allows imperialism to assume the guise of a civilizing mission. Nor is that all. Universal enlightenment is able to absorb (the ethnic, religious and political) Other within a homogeneous metropolitan conception of liberty, enlightenment and progress. As might be obvious from the above, the crucial blindness in Shelley's cultural politics is his uncritical and