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 when you learn to walk and when you learn to read.' Surprising, wonderfully funny, definitive, this is a major collection of Penelope Fitzgerald's 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