Miscellanies are hit-and-miss affairs, and some of the varied pieces gathered in this collection, which Schama likens to a salmagundi, are more rewarding than others, although they are never dull. At the core of the book  among his musings on art, theatre, film and food writing, as well as trips to Amsterdam or on the Queen Mary 2  is a hard core of brilliant essays on America that crackle with indignation. Schama is impressed by the "grieving calm" and "mass volunteerism" of New Yorkers in a classic piece he wrote for this newspaper on 14 September 2001, but a year later he observes how Bush's "Manichaean declaration of war on evil . . . made Islington cringe" and all Europe squirm, "as if a wine-and-cheese party had suddenly turned into a Pentecostal revival meeting". Schama's Dubya-hatred reaches its peak with Hurricane Katrina, but fortunately Obama's soaring oratory seems to reaffirm Schama's passionate conviction that "the survival of eloquence is the condition of both a free political society and a coherent community".