Jolyon Nuttall, a retired newspaperman from a family steeped in literature, writes with feeling and depth – and often with wry humour – about episodes in his life as diverse as the romanticism of early loves through to the agonies of boiling an egg and learning to live alone after a long marriage. He has spurned the autobiography in favour of the essay as the Orwellian literary form in which to record these and other significant happenings in his life. “Essays seem to offer almost limitless room to improvise and experiment, and yet their very freedom makes them unforgiving of literary faults: sloppiness, vagueness, pretension, structural misshapenness, an immature voice, insular material, and the nearly universal plague of bad thinking are all mercilessly exposed under the spotlight in which the essayist stands alone onstage. There are no props, no sets, no other actors; the essayist is the existentialist of literature, and a mediocre talent will wear out his audience within a couple of paragraphs” – George Packer writing on George Orwell