This collection of essays, lectures and reviews, with an extract from Lodge's diary tacked on at the end, seems essentially to be about putting a lot of pieces together to make a book, rather than developing some linking critical or intellectual theme. Lodge is a versatile writer, a prolific novelist, a playwright, and an adapter of books (including his own) for television. The authors he considers are Graham Greene, Amis, Lawrence, Henry Green, Nabokov and Joyce; the rest is mainly about his own professional experiences and how budding writers might learn from these. The book's chief value is that Lodge approaches literature from a practical, workmanlike angle and not from a critical/theoretical one.