Cryptology, the mathematical and technical science of ciphers and codes, and philology, the humanistic study of natural or human languages, are typically understood as separate domains of activity. But Brian Lennon contends that these two domains, both concerned with authentication of text, should be viewed as contiguous. He argues that computing's humanistic applications are as historically important as its mathematical and technical ones. What is more, these humanistic uses, no less than cryptological ones, are marked and constrained by the priorities of security and military institutions devoted to fighting wars and decoding intelligence. Lennon's history encompasses the first documented techniques for the statistical analysis of text, early experiments in mechanized literary analysis, electromechanical and electronic code-breaking and machine translation, early literary data processing, the computational philology of late twentieth-century humanities computing, and early twenty-first-century digital humanities. Throughout, Passwords makes clear the continuity between cryptology and philology, showing how the same practices flourish in literary study and in conditions of war. Lennon emphasizes the convergence of cryptology and philology in the modern digital password. Like philologists, hackers use computational methods to break open the secrets coded in text. One of their preferred tools is the dictionary, that preeminent product of the philologist's scholarly labor, which supplies the raw material for computational processing of natural language. Thus does the historic overlap of cryptology and philology persist in an artifact of computing-passwords-that many of us use every day.

How do we come to know a place, and in seeking to know it do we make it foreign from ourselves? Do we tackle it from other perspectives--the excavator, the traveler, the observant witness? Can we know a place without the blur of our identity, or does the attempt to extricate ourselves from the external lead only deeper? Brian Lennon seeks such knowledge in this rare and revolutionary work that blends poetry with narrative, ethnography with autobiography, and philosophy with literature. "City: An Essay" begins and ends with meditations on place, the first an unusual and intriguing excavation of the underground depths and history of New York City and the conclusion a travelogue of Italy that reads like snapshots. But place comes to reside somewhere within the landscape of the imagination.

Though classified as creative nonfiction, "City" is an open genre piece that reads with the rhythm and beauty of poetry. Despite its sometimes philosophical core, occasionally pausing to ponder Kierkegaardian dilemmas, it maintains linguistic grace and self-reflexivity. City is a unique and unmatched experimental work by an emerging and sophisticated writer who is paving exciting new aesthetic and theoretical roads.

Multilingual literature defies simple translation. Beginning with this insight, Brian Lennon examines the resistance multilingual literature offers to book publication itself. In readings of G. V. Desani's "All about H. Hatterr," Anthony Burgess's "A Clockwork Orange," Christine Brooke-Rose's "Between," Eva Hoffman's "Lost in Translation," Emine Sevgi ozdamar's "Mutterzunge," and Orhan Pamuk's "Istanbul," among other works, Lennon shows how nationalized literary print culture inverts the values of a transnational age, reminding us that works of literature are, above all, objects in motion. Looking closely at the limit of both multilingual literary expression and the literary journalism, criticism, and scholarship that comments on multilingual work, "In Babel's Shadow" presents a critical reflection on the fate of literature in a world gripped by the crisis of globalization.

In the context of The Forum for a New Ireland (1984), the Anglo-Irish Agreement (1985), and the Downing Street Declaration (1993), Lennon addresses a number of unresolved questions which impede normalisation of society in Northern Ireland. He makes the key distinction between nationalists who support the IRA, and the majority of law-abiding Catholics, and questions whether these nationalists are capable of acceptiong democratic majority decisions. The role of the United States in the continuing conflict is examined, in the light of the author's advisory work with the New Ireland Forum and the Opsahl Commission. This is a serious and balanced study of the issues and interests involved in the Northern Ireland problem.