This volume collects Geoff Dyer's freelance work between 1984 and 1998. There are sustained meditations on photographers (from canonical figures like Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa to the barely known master William Gedney), on painters (Bonnard, Gauguin), musicians (Coltrane, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan) and close critical engagements with writers (Camus, Graham Greene, Cormac McCarthy, Michael Ondaatje and Martin Amis). Also here are idiosyncratic reflections on boxing, on collecting, on Airfix models and Action Man, and often hilarious accounts of his misadventures: flying in a Mig-29 in Moscow, on the razz with Def Leppard in Seoul, on safari in Africa, and in trouble learning to freefall parachute.