Table Talk: Essays on Men and Manners

A collection of characteristically brilliant essays from one of English prose's most exact observers of human nature. Hazlitt turns his keen, unsentimental eye onto the peculiar theater of social life: the rituals of conversation, the performance of civility, the small cruelties and consolations that make up daily intercourse with one's fellow creatures. These essays on men and manners display his signature qualities - the willingness to deflate pretension, the capacity to find profound meaning in apparently trivial subjects, and a prose style that moves with satisfying ease from aphorism to anecdote to sustained argument. Whether dissecting the vanity of writers, the pleasure of solitude, or the unspoken rules that govern genteel company, Hazlitt remains a companionable provocateur, someone who sees clearly and describes what he sees with precision and wit. For readers who cherish the essay form at its most essayistic - personal, wide-ranging, unrepentantly subjective - this collection offers the particular pleasure of listening to a first-rate mind work over familiar material until it gleams with unfamiliar insight.