From the cover: Though not, stricttly speaking, a book of travel, many of these essays take the reader to distant parts of the world which now he can reach by no other means [due to the 2nd World War]: Central America, the West indies, with glimpses of China and other lands; to epochs, too, as far froom ours, Rome in the Eighteenth Century, England in the Regency. For Sir Osbert’s mind is unlike that of any writer to-day, in its richness and variety, and the fun he brings to ordinary as well as extraordinary things. Above all, there is in him a special wisdom, born of faith, steadfast in its belief that art, literature, music, humanity and the humanities, are the things of ultimate consequence to a race.