The Spectator No.50 [on the visit of the Iroquois]
1711
Based on an idea ‘stolen’ from conversation with Jonathan Swift and prefiguring Swift’s later satire – a kind of inverted Gulliver’s Travels. The previous April, four...
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The Spectator No.454 [on roving in London]
1712
After an opening declaration on the pleasures of detached, essayistic observation, or ‘spectating’, Steele describes coming from Richmond for a 24-hour ramble through central L...
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The Spectator No. 538 [on gastronomic antipathies]
1712
Demonstrating the English periodical essay’s origins in clubbable conversation, and recurring concern with ‘good taste’, Addison describes friends discussing their food avers...
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The Soccer War (Wojna futbolowa, 1978, and trans. William Brand, Granta Books, 1990)
1978
Kapuscinski presents himself as a hapless ‘amateur’ reporting to Warsaw on Latin American politics, for whom the 1969 war between Honduras and El Salvador, following an escalat...
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The Rights of History and the Rights of the Imagination (in Quarrel & Quandary)
2000
An essay about how the ‘broken umbrella of contemporary relativism’ does not change the essentially different aims of history (that which is owed to reality) and imagination (p...
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The Rambler No.135 (on the folly of annual retreats to the country)
1751
Embarking from Aristotle’s observation that man is ‘an imitative being’, Johnson attacks the fashion for retiring to the country for the summer as either mindless imitation o...
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The Rambler No.117 (on the advantages of living in a garret)
1751
Referring to the bravery of bringing forward new ideas, Johnson makes the mock-heroic announcement that he is introducing new theories on ‘the garret’, mighty subject though it...
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The Privileges [of 10th April 1840] (Fragment inédit de Stendhal, 1861, and reprinted in Memoirs of an Egoist, trans. Andrew Brown, 2003)
1861
Written at 57, two years before his death, this is the novelist’s fantasy wish-list in the format of an international treaty. Article 1 demands a good death, but, by Art...
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The Painter of Modern Life
1863
A string of eleven mini-essays praising the artist Constantin Guys for seeking ‘the fugitive, fleeting beauty of present-day life’ in almost journalistic watercolour sketches, ...
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The Myth of Sisyphus (Le Mythe de Sisyphe, 1942, and trans. Justin O’Brien, 1955)
1942
A long essay with four chapters (and an appendix on Kafka), asking whether the realisation that life is meaningless requires suicide. Camus defines absurdity as man’s rationality...
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The Metropolis and Mental Life (Die Großstadt und das Geistesleben, 1903, and trans. Kurt H. Wolff in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 1950)
1903
This precursor of urban sociology analyses metropolitan life’s impact on the personality. Throughout history, Simmel sees people resisting ‘being leveled down and worn out by a...
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The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (The London Review of Books, 1983, and collected in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales, 1985)
1983
A neurological case-study of ‘visual agnosia’, written in the accessible, urbane style that made the book a bestseller. The reader journeys through Dr Sacks’ bizarre examinat...
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