The Oxford book of essays

Of truth ; Of revenge ; Of boldness ; Of innovations ; Of masques and triumphs / Sir Francis Bacon A chambermaid ; A fair and happy milkmaid / Sir Thomas Overbury An antiquary ; A goold old man ; A pot-poet / John Earle How the distempers of these times should affect wise men / Owen Felltham On dreams / Sir Thomas Browne Of anger / Thomas Fuller A degenerate noble / Samuel Butler Of charity, of the love of God / Jeremy Taylor Of avarice / Abraham Cowley "Cahucer" (from Preface to the Fables) Good manners and good breeding ; A meditation upon a broom-stick / Jonathan Swift Thoughts in Westminster Abbey ; The Royal Exchange ; Sir Roger in Westminster Abbey ; Sir Roger at Vauxhall / Joseph Addison On recollections of childhood / Sir Richard Steele Upon affectation / Lord Chesterfield The levee / Benjamin Franklin The poor and their betters / Henry Fielding Dignity and uses of biography ; Conversation ; Debtors' prisons (1) ; Debtors' prisons (2) / Samuel Johnson Of the dignity or meanness of human nature / David Hume On dress ; A little great man ; On national prejudices / Oliver Goldsmith On war / James Boswell Dream children ; from On some of the old actors / Charles Lamb On the pleasure of hating ; Brummelliana / William Hazlitt Getting up on cold mornings / Leigh Hunt The knocking at the gat in Macbeth / Thomas de Quincey from Signs of the times / Thomas Carlyle ; from Lord Clive / Lord Macaulay On secrecy / Sir Henry Taylor Secular knowledge not a principle of action / John Henry Newman The conservative / Ralph Waldo Emerson The haunted mind / Nathaniel Hawthorne "Bentham and Coleridge" (from Coleridge) / John Stuart Mill ; City of London churches / Charles Dickens Autor de mon chapeau / William Makepeace Thackeray The plumber / Anthony Trollope Night and moonlight / Henry David Thoreau The philosophy of Christianity / James Anthony Froude Thomas Carlyle / George Eliot Heine and the Philistines (from Heinrich Heine) / Matthew Arnold from Evolution and ethics / T.H. Huxley Dull government / Walter Bagehot Talking about our troubles / Mark Rutherford from Autobiography / Sir Leslie Stephen On knowing what gives us pleasure / Samuel Butler Thoughts of God / Mark Twain Sandro Botticelli / Walter Pater Wasps / W.H. Hudson Disintroductions / Ambrose Bierce The Ph.D. octopus / William James from London / Henry James Under the early stars / Alice Meynell The acorn-gatherer / Richard Jefferies Aes triplex / Robert Louis Stevenson "the true critic" (from The critic as artist) / Oscar Wilde Sir George Grove / George Bernard Shaw The censor of plays / Joseph Conrad A visit to Walt Whitman / James G. Huneker William James / John Jay Chapman Intellectual ambition ; Intuitive morality / George Santayana Cordova / Arthur Symons On the departure of a guest / Hilaire Belloc On being modern-minded / Bertrand Russel "A clergyman" / Sir Max Beerbohm The dream / Sir Winston Churchill A defence of Penny Dreadfuls ; On sandals and simplicity / G.K. Chesterton Invective / Sir Desmond McCarthy My own centenary / E.M. Forster Creighton / Lytton Strachey The libido for the ugly ; Funeral march / H.L. Mencken Evening parties / Rose Macaulay Harriette Wilson ; The death of the moth / Virginia Woolf Finnegans wake / James Stephens The greatest Victorian / G.M. Young Insouciance / D.H. Lawrence What there is to see at the zoo / Marianne Moore Marie Lloyd / T.S. Eliot Symmetry and repitition / Sir Lewis Namier The necessary enemy / Katherine Anne Porter The sterner sex / Rebecca West The colloid and the crystal / Joseph Wood Krutch On being the right size / J.B.S. Haldane Meditation on the moon / Aldous Huxley My own ten rules for a happy marriage / James Thurber The toy farm / J.B. Priestley The case for Xanthippe / Robert Graves A preface to Persius / Edmund Wilson

About myself / E.B. White

Our half-Hogarth / V.S. Pritchett

The ant-lion / Cyril Connolly

Reflections on Gandhi / George Orwell

Well-informed circles ... and how to move in them / Evelyn Waugh

The lost childhood / Graham Greene

Adams at ease / Lionel Trilling

A new Westminster / Sir John Betjeman

The faces of Buddha / Sir William Empson

The snout / Loren Eiseley

What if

? : English versus German and French / Jacques Barzun

In search of Nib-Joy / Maurice Richardson

Young hunger / M.F.K. Fisher

Churchill and Roosevelt (from Winston Churchill in 1940) / Sir Isaiah Berlin

To err is human / Lewis Thomas

Bad poets / Randall Jarrell

Thomas Hobbes / H.R. Trevor-Roper

The apotheosis of Martin Luther King / Elizabeth Hardwick

The gangster as tragic hero / Robert Warshow

The Homburg hat / Richard Cobb

The people's victor / Conor Cruise O'Brien

Movies on television / Pauline Kael

The marquis and the madame / D.J. Enright

The savage seventh / Philip Larkin

The crisp at the crossroads / Reyner Banham

Stranger in the village / James Baldwin

Robert Graves and the twelve Caesars / Gore Vidal

La Paz / Jan Morris

A visit from royalty / Dan Jacobson

Is it alas, Yorick? / P.J. Kavanagh

Columbus and Crusoe / V.S. Naipaul

The bankrupt man / John Updike

At the dam / Joan Didion

About face / Joseph Epstein

A blizzard of tiny kisses / Clive James.