Drawing on anecdote, autobiography, and an extraordinary range of reading, novelist Tim Parks has fused together essay and narrative to create a beguilingly new reading experience, at once charming, gripping and intellectually mind-blowing. Whether he is exploring ghosts or First World War Heroes, Indian gods or Verona Football Club, adultery or the EC, each piece moves with masterful assurance towards those moments of illumination when finally we appreciate, if only fleetingly, the relationship between our most intimate experiences and the larger world of ideas, and in doing so grasp the principles that underlie our modern way of life.