Of truth ; Of revenge ; Of boldness ; Of innovations ; Of masques and triumphs / Sir Francis Bacon -- A chambermaid ; A fair and happy milkmaid / Sir Thomas Overbury -- An antiquary ; A goold old man ; A pot-poet / John Earle -- How the distempers of these times should affect wise men / Owen Felltham -- On dreams / Sir Thomas Browne -- Of anger / Thomas Fuller -- A degenerate noble / Samuel Butler -- Of charity, of the love of God / Jeremy Taylor -- Of avarice / Abraham Cowley -- "Cahucer" (from Preface to the Fables) -- Good manners and good breeding ; A meditation upon a broom-stick / Jonathan Swift -- Thoughts in Westminster Abbey ; The Royal Exchange ; Sir Roger in Westminster Abbey ; Sir Roger at Vauxhall / Joseph Addison -- On recollections of childhood / Sir Richard Steele -- Upon affectation / Lord Chesterfield -- The levee / Benjamin Franklin -- The poor and their betters / Henry Fielding -- Dignity and uses of biography ; Conversation ; Debtors' prisons (1) ; Debtors' prisons (2) / Samuel Johnson -- Of the dignity or meanness of human nature / David Hume -- On dress ; A little great man ; On national prejudices / Oliver Goldsmith -- On war / James Boswell -- Dream children ; from On some of the old actors / Charles Lamb -- On the pleasure of hating ; Brummelliana / William Hazlitt -- Getting up on cold mornings / Leigh Hunt -- The knocking at the gat in Macbeth / Thomas de Quincey -- from Signs of the times / Thomas Carlyle ; from Lord Clive / Lord Macaulay -- On secrecy / Sir Henry Taylor -- Secular knowledge not a principle of action / John Henry Newman -- The conservative / Ralph Waldo Emerson -- The haunted mind / Nathaniel Hawthorne -- "Bentham and Coleridge" (from Coleridge) / John Stuart Mill ; City of London churches / Charles Dickens -- Autor de mon chapeau / William Makepeace Thackeray -- The plumber / Anthony Trollope -- Night and moonlight / Henry David Thoreau -- The philosophy of Christianity / James Anthony Froude -- Thomas Carlyle / George Eliot -- Heine and the Philistines (from Heinrich Heine) / Matthew Arnold -- from Evolution and ethics / T.H. Huxley -- Dull government / Walter Bagehot -- Talking about our troubles / Mark Rutherford -- from Autobiography / Sir Leslie Stephen -- On knowing what gives us pleasure / Samuel Butler -- Thoughts of God / Mark Twain -- Sandro Botticelli / Walter Pater -- Wasps / W.H. Hudson -- Disintroductions / Ambrose Bierce -- The Ph.D. octopus / William James -- from London / Henry James -- Under the early stars / Alice Meynell -- The acorn-gatherer / Richard Jefferies -- Aes triplex / Robert Louis Stevenson -- "the true critic" (from The critic as artist) / Oscar Wilde -- Sir George Grove / George Bernard Shaw -- The censor of plays / Joseph Conrad -- A visit to Walt Whitman / James G. Huneker -- William James / John Jay Chapman -- Intellectual ambition ; Intuitive morality / George Santayana -- Cordova / Arthur Symons -- On the departure of a guest / Hilaire Belloc -- On being modern-minded / Bertrand Russel -- "A clergyman" / Sir Max Beerbohm -- The dream / Sir Winston Churchill -- A defence of Penny Dreadfuls ; On sandals and simplicity / G.K. Chesterton -- Invective / Sir Desmond McCarthy -- My own centenary / E.M. Forster -- Creighton / Lytton Strachey -- The libido for the ugly ; Funeral march / H.L. Mencken -- Evening parties / Rose Macaulay -- Harriette Wilson ; The death of the moth / Virginia Woolf -- Finnegans wake / James Stephens -- The greatest Victorian / G.M. Young -- Insouciance / D.H. Lawrence -- What there is to see at the zoo / Marianne Moore -- Marie Lloyd / T.S. Eliot -- Symmetry and repitition / Sir Lewis Namier -- The necessary enemy / Katherine Anne Porter -- The sterner sex / Rebecca West -- The colloid and the crystal / Joseph Wood Krutch -- On being the right size / J.B.S. Haldane -- Meditation on the moon / Aldous Huxley -- My own ten rules for a happy marriage / James Thurber -- The toy farm / J.B. Priestley -- The case for Xanthippe / Robert Graves -- A preface to Persius / Edmund Wilson --
About myself / E.B. White
Our half-Hogarth / V.S. Pritchett
The ant-lion / Cyril Connolly
Reflections on Gandhi / George Orwell
Well-informed circles ... and how to move in them / Evelyn Waugh
The lost childhood / Graham Greene
Adams at ease / Lionel Trilling
A new Westminster / Sir John Betjeman
The faces of Buddha / Sir William Empson
The snout / Loren Eiseley
? : English versus German and French / Jacques Barzun
In search of Nib-Joy / Maurice Richardson
Young hunger / M.F.K. Fisher
Churchill and Roosevelt (from Winston Churchill in 1940) / Sir Isaiah Berlin
To err is human / Lewis Thomas
Bad poets / Randall Jarrell
Thomas Hobbes / H.R. Trevor-Roper
The apotheosis of Martin Luther King / Elizabeth Hardwick
The gangster as tragic hero / Robert Warshow
The Homburg hat / Richard Cobb
The people's victor / Conor Cruise O'Brien
Movies on televison / Pauline Kael
The marquis and the madame / D.J. Enright
The savage seventh / Philip Larkin
The crisp at the crossroads / Reyner Banham
Stranger in the village / James Baldwin
Robert Graves and the twelve Caesars / Gore Vidal
A visit from royalty / Dan Jacobson
Is it alas, Yorick? / P.J. Kavanagh
Columbus and Crusoe / V.S. Naipaul
The bankrupt man / John Updike
About face / Joseph Epstein
A blizzard of tiny kisses / Clive James.
