The book: theme and content -- The author: encountering history -- The idea of the city in European thought: Voltaire to Spengler -- History as vocation in Burckhardt's Basel -- Medieval revival and its modern content: Coleridge, Pugin, and Disraeli -- The quest for the grail: Wagner and Morris -- Museum in contested space: the sword, the scepter, and the ring -- Grace and the word: Austria's two cultures and their modern fate -- Generational tension and cultural change -- From public scene to private space: architecture as culture criticism -- Gustav Mahler: formation and transformation -- To the Egyptian dig: Freud's psycho-archeology of cultures -- History and the study of culture.