Comrades!

Returning from summer peregrinations and settling back into work or the treadmill of the new academic year, one's email inbox bulges with unwanted goo. The Turtle, therefore, will keep its September missive brief.

Our recent triumph has been the launch of the long-awaited Summer Books Special or Turtle Literary Supplement, which was finally launched to the world at the end of last month. Seven review essays have been published on subjects as diverse as Bruce Chatwin, football and postcolonial fiction, and a couple more have been further delayed, but will take their place in the Supplement quite soon. We thank all our authors, but in particular Amy Tabor, who makes her debut in the Turtle with a fine essay on Saint Augustine, and Jon Wilson, whose remarks on Quentin Skinner mark his return to our columns for the first time in five years. We're still very keen to collect reviews to make the Turtle a vital centre for discussion of recent books, so if you didn't quite manage to get your own work into the Supplement, please send it along and we will be happy to post it. An Autumn Books Supplement is not at all inconceivable.

And our roster of articles continues to lengthen. Jonathan Wilson (not the aforementioned Jon, but somebody quite different) sent us a stimulating essay on Samuel Beckett, deepening the Turtle's Cultural Front. Indeed, for his past and present contributions to the Turtle, its Dictionary ("Eliot, George") and its Books pages, we're delighted to proclaim Jonathan as the Stakhanovite of the Month for September 1999. He went way over quota this summer, and we honour his contribution to the Turtle in this fitting fashion.

In addition to this month's Stakhanovite, the Turtle also salutes the Second Conference of the People's Global Action against "Free" Trade and the World Trade Organisation, which took place recently in Bangalore, India, and our eyewitness account of this important event has been posted in our pages.

The PGA are not the only ones who combine progressive environmental and social goals, and the Turtle also Raises An Approving Eyebrow towards Arkadii Lytkin, of Krasnoyarsk Krai in Russia, who (so the Komersant-Daily reported on 28 July in a story picked up by Prague's Open Media Research Institute) has spent the last three years building a two-story dacha out of 6,000 beer bottles. Impressive.

Finally... If you'd like to contribute an article, book review, Dictionary Entry, or Salute, do get in touch. The Turtle bulges with good things, but progress must be unrelenting, and the struggle carries on.

Avanti!

The Editors