This book, first published in 1947, is collection of critical essays by Herbert Read that had not been previously published in book form. The essays cover several different subject areas, including literature, art, architecture, and film, from a span of twenty years. This title will be of interest to a variety of readers.

1. The Greatest Work of Art in the World 2. Eric Gill 3. Klee 4. Lawrence of Arabia 5. "The Seven Pillars of Wisdom" 6. Art and the People 7. Henry James 8. Art and War 9. George Herbert 10. Cezanne 11. The "Prelude" in Wartime 12. Bosch and Dali 13. The Paradox of Anarchism 14. Havelock Ellis 15. The Failure of the War Books 16. William Morris 17. Ben Nicholson 18. English Prose 19. Henri Rousseau 20. The Faculty of Abstraction 21. The Last of the Bohemians 22. Art and Autarky 23. Coleridge 24. Vulgarity 25. Shelley 26. Problems of Primitive Art 27. Milton 28. Sickert 29. Film Aesthetic 30. James Joyce 31. The Language of the Eye 32. Nathaniel Hawthorne 33. Gerard Manley Hopkins 34. The Poetry and Prose of Painting 35. Doctor Faustus 36. Toulouse-Lautrec 37. Wordsworth's Remorse 38. Realism and Superrealism 39. A Further Note of Superrealism 40. George Saintsbury 41. Max Liebermann 42. Art and Ethics 43. The Later Yeats 44. Socialist Realism 45. The Significance of William James 46. The Poet and the Film 47. The Message of Ruskin 48. Etruscan Art 49. Walter de la Mare 50. Jean Helion 51. Kierkegaard 52. Indian Art 53. The Architect's Place in a Modern Society 54. D. H. Lawrence 55. Modern Chinese Painting 56. Walter Bagehot 57. The Triumph of Picasso 58. The International Situation in American Fiction 59. Roger Fry 60. Raphael 61. T. E. Hulme 62. Seurat's "La Baignade" 63. Stendhal 64. Georges Rouault 65. A Community of Individuals 66. Picasso's "Guernica" 67. Machine Aesthetic 68. Andre Gide 69. The Duality of Leonardo 70. The "Areopagitica" 71. Envoy; Notes