The Ideal of Culture: Essays

Part one: The culture. The ideal of culture (2017) 
 From parent to parenthood (2015) 
 Death takes no holiday (2014) 
 Wit (2015) 
 Genius (2013) 
 Cowardice (2015) 
 Old age and other laughs (2012) 
 What\'s so funny? (2014) 
 The fall of the WASPs (2013) 
 The virtue of victims (2015) 
 Cool (2017) 
 The sixties (2017) 
 University of Chicago days (2017) --
Part two: Literary. Eric Auerbach (2014) 
 Kafka (2013) 
 Orwell (1990) 
 Proust (2012) 
 C.K. Scott Moncrieff (2015) 
 The young T.S. Eliot (2015) 
 Philip Larkin (2014) 
 Willa Cather (2013) 
 George Kennan (2014) 
 Isaiah Berlin (2016) 
 Michael Oakeshott (2015) 
 John O\'Hara (2016) 
 F. Scott Fitzgerald, a most successful failure (2017) 
 Wolcott Gibbs (2011) --
Evelyn Waugh (2017) 
 J.F. Powers (2013) 
 Edward Gibbon (2015) 
 Herodotus (2014) 
 Tacitus (2016) 
 Encyclopaedia Britannica : the eleventh (2016) 
 Grammar (2014) 
 Clichés (2015) 
 Literary rivals (2015) 
 Why read biography? (2016) --
Part three: Jewish. Sholem Aleichem (2014) 
 Jokes: a genre of thought (2017) 
 Jews on the loose (2016) 
 Jewish pugs (2016) 
 Harry Golden (2015) 
 Gershom Scholem (2017) 
 Dreaming of a Jewish Christmas (2015) --
Part four: Masterpieces. The brothers Ashkenazai (2009) 
 Civilization of the Renaissance (2013) 
 Montesquieu (2016) 
 Machiavelli (2016) 
 Gogol (2013) 
 Speak, memory (2014) 
 Epictetus (2016) 
 H.W. Fowler 
 As a driven leaf (2015) 
 Joseph and his brothers (2012) 
 Life and fate (2007) 
 Memoirs of Hadrian (2010) 
 Charnwood\'s Lincoln (2014) 
 Book of the courtier (2013) 
 Ronald Syme (2016) 
 Quest for Corvo (2009) 
 The old bunch (2012) 
 Life of Johnson (2015) --
Part five: Hitting eighty (2017) --
Original publication information for essays in this book.