Description
ABOUT THE BOOK : This study, several years in the making, in some respects quite aptly resembles the growth of a child from an embryo. The germ, a presentation of twenty minutes’ duration at an international conference held at Hamburg in 1985, grew by constant accretion and revision until it was deemed worthy of being submitted as a Habilitationsschrift (post-doctoral thesis) to the University of Hamburg in 1992. But even after its acceptance in 1993 the process of addition and revision continued uninterruptedly until at last I decided that if I did not set myself a fixed cut-off date after which I would stop feeding it with new information, this baby of mine would keep on growing only in my computer and never make it to the printing press and the light of day. In accordance with this decision, new material chanced upon after the end of 1996 has rarely been included, though prior to publication indexes have been added to the whole, this taking several years due to other pressing duties.