Witty and stylish essays on the oddities and beauties of the English language

on the greatness of Samuel Johnson; on the comedy of P. G. Wodehouse; on the delights of retirement; on writers savaging other writers; on euphemistic cursing; on strange word origins; on mathematical language; on the majesty of the Irish Literary Renaissance and the power of the Southern American Renascence—on James Joyce, John Millington Synge, Yeats, and Lady Gregory, and on Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Zora Neale Hurston, Katherine Anne Porter, and William Faulkner; poems of love, nature, and comedy.