In a series of twenty-four letters Michael Mayne makes an offering to his grandchildren of all that has inspired him in literature, music and art. It is, in Ronald Blythe’s words `an inventory of his joy’. Written in a candid autobiographical fashion, the book is a passionate plea to the reader to pass through their one earthly life with a trained and watching eye. It is a confession of how he came to unify his outer and inner worlds, the ordinariness and yet the extraordinariness of everything…