1. Title Page
  2. Introduction
  3. Acknowledgments
  4. Poetry for a Tiny Room
  5. Spring’s Fruits in Autumn
  6. The Corruption of the Exotic
  7. Why, This is Hell
  8. On the End of Every Fork
  9. Into the Mass Mangle
  10. Bitter-sweet Savour
  11. The Big Daddy of the Beats
  12. The Seventeenth Novel
  13. Here Parla Man Marcommunish
  14. The Book is Not for Reading
  15. The Comedy of Ultimate Truths
  16. Europe’s Day of the Dead
  17. Surprise from the Grave
  18. Last Exit to Brooklyn
  19. A Good Read
  20. Bless Thee, Bottom?
  21. Like Mr Priestley, Enjoying It
  22. The Waste Land
  23. My Life and Times
  24. On Lengthy Matters
  25. Last of the Literary Dandies
  26. Five-Finger Exercises
  27. Creeping Towards Salvation
  28. A Very Blasphemous Fallacy
  29. Glittering Prizes 
  30. A Talent to Remember
  31. Jong in Triumph
  32. Partridge in a Word Tree
  33. A Movie that Changed my Life
  34. By-products of the Ink Trade
  35. Pilgrimage
  36. Finks and Winchells
  37. The School of Jesuits
  38. Last Embers of Modernism
  39. Medieval Sherlock
  40. The Lords of Limit
  41. Locutions of Sex and Death
  42. Why I Write
  43. Still Life
  44. The Anachronist Strikes Back
  45. Spirit of Cervantes
  46. Defector as Hero
  47. Where Sex Meets Self-Improvement
  48. The Academic Critic and the Living Writer
  49. The Master of Erudite Silence
  50. Verbal Subversions
  51. Eye of a Stranger
  52. Wilde with all Regret
  53. Mr Gibbon and the Huns
  54. The Literature Industry
  55. The Man Who Invented Himself
  56. Bunn in the Oven
  57. A Strong Whiff of Kif from Tangier
  58. The Life of Graham Greene
  59. Joyce as Novelist
  60. Can Art be Immoral?
  61. Getting the Language Right
  62. Stop the Clock on Violence
  63. Confessions of the Hack Trade
  64. Index
  65. About the Authors
  66. Also available from Carcanet Press
  67. Copyright