text: I should first confess my bias--I have often been tickled and sometimes awed by Mortimer's way with English prose for 20 years.  So, in picking up this book I had the high expectations one might have before meeting an old friend or beloved teacher.  No disappointment.  Even if some of these essays are slightly less effervescent than others, all are at least wonderful, and several are both brilliant and touching.  
  
  Mortimer has given us a collection of short essays, conversational and often wryly funny, which he intends as a kind of spiritual bequeathal to his family and other heirs.  The chapters range across a broad range of subjects, some perhaps outwardly frivolous, like the cooking of eggs.  But in the main, Mortimer touches on matters of great substance--the nature of beauty, how to be happy, surprising ways in which our world has managed to be unjust, places and times for sex, how to dine sociably, the love of children, faith and reason, the terrors of the writer facing blank paper, and many more. I found these essays to be wise and absolutely delicious. I suspect that readers who have enjoyed Rumpole, or Mortimer's other biographical essays like Summer of a Doormouse, or Clinging to the Wreckage, will be quite pleased with these sketches.
  
  Mortimer may, sadly, be nearing the end of his life, but at present he seems to be on a literary tear.  I, for one, wish him many more prolific years
  