Why I write -- The spike -- A hanging -- Shooting an elephant -- Bookshop memories -- Marrakech -- Charles Dickens -- Boys' weeklies -- Inside the whale -- My country right or left -- The lion and the unicorn -- Wells, Hitler and the world state -- The art of Donald McGill -- Rudyard Kipling -- Looking back on the Spanish War -- W.B. Yeats -- Poetry and the microphone -- Benefit of clergy: some notes on Salvador Dali -- Raffles and Miss Blandish -- Arthur Koestler -- Antisemitism in Britain -- In defence of P.G. Wodehouse -- Notes on Nationalism -- Good bad books -- The sporting spirit -- Nonsense poetry -- The prevention of literature -- Books v. cigarettes -- Decline of the English murder -- Politics and the English language -- Some thoughts on the common toad -- A good word for the Vicar of Bray -- Confessions of a book reviewer -- Politics vs literature: an examination of Gulliver's travels -- How the poor die -- Riding down from Bangor -- Lear, Tolstoy and the fool -- Such, such were the joys -- Writers and Leviathan -- Reflections on Gandhi.