John Updike considers it one of the less elevated impulses, Norman Mailer sees it as an inevitable conflict, Wallace Stevens saw it as one of the greatest aspects of literature. There is a special frisson when great writers meet, and when one - or both - of them records the event, the result is rarely straightforward. This collection includes Jonson on Shakespeare; Hazlitt on Coleridge; Philip Roth dashing the hopes of a dying Bernard Malamud; Virginia Woolf glimpsing D. H. Lawrence on an Italian railway platform from a passing train; and Martin Amis interviewing Nicholson Baker, a writer who is both taller and younger than he is. As W. H. Auden observed, writers have no small talk when they meet; as evidence here, this frequently leads to fireworks.

An anthology of rivalry, jealousy, hatred, bitterness and revenge, dotted with occasional moments of admiration, magnanimity and affection.