Hunger and ideology.--Authority and obedience.--Snopes revisited.--Sinclair Lewis, I and II.--Stalky & Co.--Mt. Everest and the British national spirit.--Evelyn Waugh and the art of entertainment.--Three obsessed critics.--The ideal reviewer.--The limits of literary history.--Madness, literature, and society, I and II.--Starting in with George Eliot.--Awakening from the nightmare? Notes on the historical novel.--Language into structure: Pickwick papers.--Freud and Dora: story, history, case history.--Dashiell Hammett and The Continental Op.