The poet WH Auden was also a prolific and accomplished writer of prose. This volume includes every piece he wrote between 1949 and 1955 - more than 100 essays, reviews, introductions and lectures. Their variety of style and subject is almost inexhaustible, covering opera, ballet, cinema, poetry, cartoons, religion and politics, and writers as diverse as Virginia Woolf, Graham Greene and JRR Tolkien. Mendelson's introduction and notes place the pieces in their biographical and historical context.