The essays in this collection are a mixed bag of lectures and newspaper articles written between 1995 and 2006, although Mak says that they have all been reworked to some extent for book publication.

About half the essays are about cities and urbanisation, with special reference to Mak's own city, Amsterdam — he looks at the 17th century city and the role of the City Hall on the Dam, the history of ideas of urban design, the role of nostalgia and preservation in a living city, the shift from individual cities to the "Randstad" conurbation, and the history of the garden suburbs built in the 1920s. But there is also a reflection on the role and development of folktales in rural life, drawing on the Frisian folktale collector Ype Poortinga, and there is a group of essays on truth, fiction, and the role of journalism.

As in In Europa, Mak is clearly pessimistic about the way society in general, and the Netherlands in particular, is going. He is especially worried about what he sees as the destructive growth of inequality resulting from the policy of a succession of Dutch governments to copy the Thatcherite ideology of unfettered free-market capitalism, the moral bankruptcy of blindly following the US into two Middle East wars, and the way the press and society in general prefer to close our eyes to some difficult truths (e.g. climate/resources/immigration/colonial past). All of this, he feels, is providing breeding ground for dangerous populism. He points to the way voters in the US, against all common sense and self-interest, have felt compelled to elect the most self-evidently incompetent and venal president in history (no, not that one: he's talking about George W Bush). And to the vacuum in Dutch politics that Pim Fortuyn was able to move into, and which his murder has left open again.

Erudite, well-argued and elegant prose, as you would expect from Mak, but reading it 13 years later it does make you wonder how we made it through the 2010s without encountering the end of the world as we know it... ( )