A beloved book. Certain of these essays I have read many times and have no doubt I will read many more. "The Guilty Vicarage" (detective fiction), "The I Without a Self" (Kafka), "The Joker in the Pack" ("Othello", actually, Iago), "Music In Shakespeare" (self evident). However, however... Auden always fancied himself an epigrammatist, and he did, on occasion, come up with some good ones. Several sections of this book are merely collections of what I'm sure he thought were some choice specimens -- the chapters called "Reading", "Writing", "Hic et Ille." He rarely, to my mind, achieved the kind of provocative, double-edged quality of the best practitioners of this particular art, though. Many of his quips (they are really not much more than that) are just plain wrong and not a few are simply silly. I refuse to dwell on this, though, and will return once again to read Auden's forever fresh observations of the theme of master & servant in "Balaam and His Ass." ( )