The author of The Tastemakers, Snobs, and The Lively Audience offers a marvelous collection of informal essays on the arts and manners of our time, our enthusiasms, distastes, and foibles. In his inimitable style Lynes writes engagingly about places and people and crusades, about style and those who think they know what it is and those who know better, managing somehow to create a civilization worth saving in the end.