Woman / G.K. Chesterton -- King Lear's daughter / Maurice Baring -- The Somme still flows / Edmund Blunden -- How it strikes a contemporary / Virginia Woolf -- Tradition and the individual talent / T.S. Eliot -- Laughter / Max Beerbohm -- Why the novel matters / D.H. Lawrence -- Literary booms / Desmond McCarthy -- Sermons in cats / Aldous Huxley -- About bathrooms / A.P. Herbert -- The sad story of Dr Colbatch / Lytton Strachey -- Reflections on journalism / H.L. Mencken -- The crack-up / F. Scott Fitzgerald -- The secret life of James Thurber / James Thurber -- Memory / Martha Gellhorn -- The head of a leader / Christopher Isherwood -- England your England / George Orwell -- The guilty vicarage / W.H. Auden -- My confession / Mary McCarthy -- Mass civilization and minority culture / F.R. Leavis -- The little store / Eudora Welty -- The lost childhood / Graham Greene -- My war / Paul Fussell -- Philoctetes: the wound and the bow / Edmund Wilson -- The concentration camps / Hannah Arendt.

An American in London / Cyril Connolly -- The obscurity of the poet / Randall Jarrell -- In the middle of the journey / V.S. Naipaul -- The ring of time / E.B. White -- Time of arrival / Dan Jacobson -- The English aristocracy / Nancy Mitford -- Notes of a native son / James Baldwin -- The white Negro / Norman Mailer -- Return trip to nirvana / Arthur Koestler -- The holy family / Gore Vidal -- The Oswald family / Elizabeth Hardwick -- These radical chic evenings / Tom Wolfe -- My baseball years / Philip Roth -- The pleasure principle / Philip Larkin -- Why are you telling me all this? / Kingsley Amis -- Goodbye to all that / Joan Didion -- The bankrupt man / John Updike -- Risk / A. Alvarez -- Living on capital / Jonathan Raban -- Are you distraining me? / Karl Miller -- Down with dons / John Carey -- Phantom of the opera: the Republicans in 1988 / Martin Amis -- On not knowing the half of it: my Jewish self / Christopher Hitchens -- Mrs Thatcher remembers / Julian Barnes.