Comprising thirty-three biographical sketches of some of the twentieth-century's most influential and powerful people in both politics and the arts, including Hitler, Stalin, de Valera, Mussolini, de Gaulle, André Malraux, Bertrand Russell, Dali, Lenin, Simone de Beauvoir, and David Ben-Gurian, PORTRAITS - POWER AND GLORY VIS-À-VIS FORM AND CONTENTMENT (1985) seeks to provoke as well as to praise, and should prove of interest to those who are curious to learn how various exceptional men - and one exceptional woman - measure up to a Social Transcendentalist analysis or, more correctly, to the scrutiny of someone who approaches life from a specific ideological standpoint with a view to measuring the achievements of others in relation to it. Although Mr O'Loughlin had dealt with some of the subjects, including Sartre, Huxley, and Durrell before (see BECOMING AND BEING [1982]), his treatment of them here is far more subjectively critical and thus a reflection, in large measure, of the way his thinking had progressed in the intervening three years since the earlier excursion into biography which, characteristic of a more relativistic approach to literature coloring much of his work at that time, also embraced a series of autobiographical sketches. No such relativity applies here, however, although the choice of both politicians and artists is anything but absolutist!