Sting in West's Mexican tale

Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States.' This fairly devastating judgment was delivered not by some wise-cracking, visiting journalist but by Porfirio Diaz: one of Mexico's more villainous, venal and corrupt presidents who was, after all, in a position to know.

His great aphorism is not quoted by Rebecca West in her wise and witty book on Mexico, but she does remark that when, as a young man, Diaz was appointed to be Governor of the cattle state of Chihuahua in 1910, it was because he 'had seduced his niece and had been given office to steady him'.

A typically Mexican anecdote, and an even more typically waspish observation by the great West.

The redoubtable Dame Rebecca died, aged 90, in 1983, and this volume - part history, part traveller's tale - was based on visits to Mexico in the late Sixties, but was left unfinished at her death.

It has been scrupulously edited by Bernard Schweizer and is far more than a piece of literary archaeology.

West, striking and handsome in old age, had been a great beauty when young - a fiery, feminist socialist, the mistress of H.G. Wells (by whom she had a son), a gifted novelist (The Return Of The Soldier, The Fountain Overflows, etc.) and a brilliant, polemical reporter as in The Meaning Of Treason, still the best account of the Nuremberg war crimes trials after the defeat of Nazi Germany.

She also wrote what is probably the finest travel book of the last century, her epic two-volume study of Yugoslavia, Black Lamb And Grey Falcon - indubitably her masterpiece.

Survivors In Mexico is her attempt, while in her vigorous 70s, to replicate that unique mixture of history thrillingly re-told with sharp, thumbnail sketches of real people met on the way, and sardonic, witty analysis of the political duplicity, sharp practice, cruelty and greed that turned the highly sophisticated civilisation of the Aztecs into the sprawling modern state we now know.

The great thing about Rebecca West was that she never went with the flow, never accepted a received idea.

The conventional wisdom is that the beautiful artist Frida Kahlo and the great, but not beautiful, mural painter Diego

Rivera were passionate lovers as well as artists.

So they were, but West gazes at a photograph of them looking at each other 'with that look of slow pneumatic expansion always displayed by lovers in opera, which suggests that, like balloons, they have to be subjected to a certain degree of inflation before they can get off the ground'.

She can be equally scathing about the titanic figures of Mexico's past.

Her acute political antennae are put to merciless use in her account of how the Spanish Conquistador, Hernan Cortes, managed to outmanoeuvre the fabled Aztec Emperor Montezuma (his name means 'He who gets angry like a Lord').