The previously uncollected occasional prose of a great English writer full of wit, feeling and illumination.

Twice in your life you know that you are approved of by everyone: when you learn to walk and when you learn to read.

Surprising, wonderfully funny, definitive, this is a major collection of Penelope Fitzgeralds reviews, essays and autobiographical writings.

Includes pieces on contemporary novelists Giles Foden, Anne Enright, Carol Shields, Rose Tremain, Roddy Doyle; on classic writers Muriel Spark, A.E. Housman, Rose Macaulay, M.R. James, Stevie Smith, Dorothy L. Sayers; on remembering her grandfather E.H. Shepard; on her love of Devon and Spain and William Morris; on writers in their old age; and witty and poignant recollections of her schooldays, her life on a Thames barge, her childhood in Hampstead and the ghost who lived next door but one.

Includes an introduction by Hermione Lee