Part one: The culture. The ideal of culture (2017) ; From parent to parenthood (2015) ; Death takes no holiday (2014) ; Wit (2015) ; Genius (2013) ; Cowardice (2015) ; Old age and other laughs (2012) ; What's so funny? (2014) ; The fall of the WASPs (2013) ; The virtue of victims (2015) ; Cool (2017) ; The sixties (2017) ; University of Chicago days (2017)
Part two: Literary. Eric Auerbach (2014) ; Kafka (2013) ; Orwell (1990) ; Proust (2012) ; C.K. Scott Moncrieff (2015) ; The young T.S. Eliot (2015) ; Philip Larkin (2014) ; Willa Cather (2013) ; George Kennan (2014) ; Isaiah Berlin (2016) ; Michael Oakeshott (2015) ; John O'Hara (2016) ; F. Scott Fitzgerald, a most successful failure (2017) ; Wolcott Gibbs (2011)
Evelyn Waugh (2017) ; J.F. Powers (2013) ; Edward Gibbon (2015) ; Herodotus (2014) ; Tacitus (2016) ; Encyclopaedia Britannica : the eleventh (2016) ; Grammar (2014) ; Clichés (2015) ; Literary rivals (2015) ; Why read biography? (2016)
Part three: Jewish. Sholem Aleichem (2014) ; Jokes: a genre of thought (2017) ; Jews on the loose (2016) ; Jewish pugs (2016) ; Harry Golden (2015) ; Gershom Scholem (2017) ; Dreaming of a Jewish Christmas (2015)
Part four: Masterpieces. The brothers Ashkenazai (2009) ; Civilization of the Renaissance (2013) ; Montesquieu (2016) ; Machiavelli (2016) ; Gogol (2013) ; Speak, memory (2014) ; Epictetus (2016) ; H.W. Fowler ; As a driven leaf (2015) ; Joseph and his brothers (2012) ; Life and fate (2007) ; Memoirs of Hadrian (2010) ; Charnwood's Lincoln (2014) ; Book of the courtier (2013) ; Ronald Syme (2016) ; Quest for Corvo (2009) ; The old bunch (2012) ; Life of Johnson (2015)
Part five: Hitting eighty (2017)
Original publication information for essays in this book.
