This engaging collection of articles, essays, reviews, and poems, written over a period of thirty years by the author of A Passage to India, A Room with a View, and Howards End, contains such well-known pieces as "Notes on the English Character, " "Adrift in India, " and "Me, Them and You." Also collected are essays on literary figures -- T. S. Eliot, Joseph Conrad, Jane Austen, and others -- whose work Forster especially admired. Whether writing on the consolations of history or on the strengthening power of art, Forster's prose is at once distinguished and entertaining.