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The opening section gathers and summarizes lives drawn from a medieval Arabic biographical dictionary, presenting pithy character sketches, curious anecdotes, and occasional lyrical verses while sketching the compiler's life and methods. The commentator highlights human idiosyncrasies and selections that range from poignant domestic feeling to ornate poetic conceits. A following sequence of diversions collects short essays and sketches on varied cultural and social topics—nurses, public monuments, literary manners, wartime notes and other small observations—offering conversational reflections, light criticism, and personal anecdote. The whole balances antiquarian interest with convivial, anecdotal prose.
With the exception of a few pages, the longest essay in this book—that which gives it its title—is now published for the first time. The papers grouped under the headings "Diversions" and "On Bellona's Hem" which follow have already appeared in print, in Punch and The Sphere, but in their present form have been always revised and often extended.
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