History & politics. "The cleric of treason" : on Anthony Blunt ; "Wien, Wien, nur du allein" : on Webern & Vienna ; "De profundis" : on Solzhenitsyn's gulag ; "God's spies" : on Graham Greene ; "From the House of the Dead" : on Albert Speer ; "De mortuis" : on Aries & new French history
Writers and writing. "One thousand years of solitude" : on Salvatore Satta ; "Killing time" : on George Orwell's 1984 ; "Black Danube" " on Karl Kraus & Thomas Bernhard ; "B.B." : on Bertolt Brecht ; "Uneasy rider: " on Robert M. Pirsig ; "Rare bird" : on Guy Davenport ; "Dead letters" " on John Barth ; "Tigers in the mirror" : on Jorge Luis Borges ; "Of nuance and scruple" : on Samuel Beckett ; "Under Eastern eyes" : on Alexander Solzhenitsyn & other Russians ; "Cat man" : on Louis-Ferdinand Celine
Thinkers. "The friend of a friend" : on Walter Benjamin & Gershom Scholem ; "Bad Friday" : on Simone Weil ; "The lost garden" : on Claude Lévi-Strauss ; "Short shrift" : on E.M. Cioran ; "Ancient glittering eyes" : on Bertrand Russell ; "A tale of three cities" : on Elias Canetti ; "La morte d'Arthur" : on Arthur Koestler ; "The tongues of man" : on Noam Chomsky
Life studies. "A death of kings" : on chess ; "Give the word" : on James Murray & the OED ; "An examined life" : on Robert Hutchins & the University of Chicago
Appendix. All George Steiner's essays in The New Yorker.
