Derek Mahon, best known as a poet, worked as a freelance journalist for many years, and his first prose book brings together a selection of his feature articles, lectures and book reviews. Some of these, like the essays on MacNeice and Beckett, Brian Moore and J.G. Farrell, are seriously 'literary' in nature; while others, like the reports from Coleraine, Rome and Los Angeles, are more discursive and relaxed, if not downright mischievous.

'Mahon takes his honourable place as a conscientious, highly productive, often insightful literary journalist whose distinguishing tone is a certain lightness of touch combined with an infectious, adroitly humorous pleasure at what the world of letters has to offer.'
                                                                                                                                                         — Terence Brown