A highly reflective record of some eighteen months of solitary confinement in a French prison during the war provides not only what Christopher Fry calls (in his foreword) ""the irrigation of physical and spiritual loneliness"" but also a highly civilized self- examination. The discovery that variety is not the spice- but the ""very stuff"" of life; the self-denial and self-discipline through which he attained a ""sort of balance with the empty environment""; the sun and shadows which were his timepiece in a timeless world; the agonizing constant of hunger and the gradual physical deterioration- all form this retrospective narrative which scans ""the horizon of existence... behind the variety and activity of life""... And over and above the austerity of an experience such as this, there is the sense of life beyond the self which lends a philosophic content. An assured stylist, Burney writes with taste as well as discernment-and his book should reach the selective reader.