In a book-in-progress entitled “Half-read Wisdom”: Classics, Modernism and the Celtic Fringe, Dr. Baker examines the relationship between ideology, antiquity and the emergence of modernist style in depth. The “half-read” or partial knowledge of classical and Celtic languages had a major impact, he argues, on the formation of political and linguistic nationalisms in early twentieth-century Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The broad reception of classics also exercised a dominant influence over major forms of modernist expression—forms which often arose as part of a complex response to ‘nation-building’ on the British Isles. Though largely untrained in classical and Celtic language, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, David Jones and Hugh MacDiarmid each found new ways to bring the authority and example of antiquity into newly forged multilingual forms of modernist writing. From both an historical and a formal perspective, Dr. Baker documents the development of their multilingualism—the modernism of the ‘Celtic Fringe’—and sets out, in conclusion, a comparative genealogy which illustrates the diverse ways by which classical and Celtic languages were syntactically registered and ideologically translated into the idioms of Yeats, Joyce, Jones and MacDiarmid.