A commonplace book, by its very nature, should be unique; D. J. Enright's proves to be a mixture of personal, critical, playful, and profound. It is a commerce between the author and other writers, touching, for instance, on childhood, young murderers, and the use and abuse of stereotypes, modern biography, ars erotica old and new, animals and man's assumed dominion over them, obsolete notions of integrity in business and government, and the machinery of dreaming.

A common reader himself, and as light of heart as the subject will allow, the author explores such prose poets as Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Freud, some curious points of theology, the penalties of imagination, and linguistic bizarrerie in sundry quarters. He looks into the world of books, contemporary Grub Street, the eccentricities of criticism, the reductive tendency of current fiction, literary theory and practice, and the necessity and impracticability of censorship.

D. J. Enright casts a cool eye on contemporary manners, an amused one on mishaps and misunderstandings, not least those affecting old age, and a sad one on our perversities and crimes and other marks of original sin. In so doing he gives us a 'kind of' autobiography of a man whose life is inseparable from literature.