A collection of poignant and vivid essays from Ferdinand Mount - a prizewinning novelist, essayist and political journalist. Includes reviews on some of literature's finest, from Rudyard Kipling and Alan Bennett to Thomas Hardy and John Keats.

Ferdinand Mount was born in 1939. For many years he was a columnist at the Spectator and then the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Times. In between, he was head of the Downing Street Policy Unit and then editor of the Times Literary Supplement. He is now a prize-winning novelist, author of the bestselling memoir Cold Cream, the controversial The New Few and the bestselling The Tears of the Rajas. He lives in London.