As the author states in the opening chapter, it is partly a collection of case-histories of his writing career over twenty years as a professional writer (with the book being dedicated to his parents, Peter and Monica Raban).

The first part is mainly composed of book reviews he wrote for various literary journals and his subjects include: living in London, the Romantic poet Byron, Thackeray, Henry Mayhew, a well-researched piece on Anthony Trollope (although it is a pity there is so little of the writer's thoughts on his great masterpiece The Way We Live Now), who still remains a highly under-rated Victorian novelist, and three penetrative pieces on Evelyn Waugh, of whom Raban is a great admirer.

His cult of the noble (which was much more a dream of living in a Burne-Jonesish world of sunlit castles and pure chivalry than it was of toadying after titles), his fiercely traditionalist Catholicism, his horror of the urban proletariat, were too wide-eyed to be either dangerous or mean.

The bourgeois virtues of common sense and good manners (the besetting vices of so many modern English novelists) were totally foreign to him - not because he was a snob but because he never forgot what it was like to be a child.'

He also includes a review of Anthony Powell, rightly criticizing the first part of his memoirs, Infants of the Spring, as being,"... a book so boring, reticent and formulaic that it would hardly be a creditable effort had it come from the hand of an idle brigadier jotting down his Notess of an Old Soldier or Tales of an Officer's Mess.

Just like the young aspiring writer in Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise, named Shelleyblake (a pun on the two Romantic poets) by Jonathan Raban, he too wanted to write plays.

However, the downside is that they have lost the family closeness that existed in the pre-war years, and their children and grandchildren prefer to be unencumbered with any elderly relatives who may embarrass their guests over Christmas.

The whole experience at the hotel is a bitter-sweet one and Raban's last memory is of Frances, a lonely spinster hospital worker, waiting forlornly for her bus to 'take her back to her Christchurch maisonette and her job on the geriatric ward.'

Living with Loose Ends is a rather rambling account of family life, but 'Freya Stark on the Euphrates' and 'Fishing' - describing the writer's long love affair with the rod and reel - are two well-crafted articles that have a strong merit in their own right.

'Belloc at Sea' - about Belloc's The Cruise of the Nona - is in part recreated in Coasting, and 'Young's Slow Boats' is interesting from the perspective of one travel writer writing about another.

Raban gives his own thoughts on what has drawn so many writers, including himself, to the travel book: 'It is the supreme improvisatory form; one can play it by ear; it will happily accommodate all sorts of conditions of writing.

'Florida' is a remarkable article based on Raban's visit to Florida, attracted by the thrillers of John D. MacDonald, 'With their bodice-ripper covers and titles like Nightmare in Pink, A Deadly Shade of Gold and A Purple Place for Dying.

For Raban, MacDonald (whom he meets three years before his death) created an extremely vivid portrait of a 'jungly Eden, spoilt and besmirched by human vanity and greed ... a lovely paradise that was being cut down to make room for shopping malls, condominium blocks, six-lane highways, giant billboards and pagoda-style Kingburger palaces.

Raban goes onto re-create this visit near the end of his later book, Hunting Mister Heartbreak: A Discovery of America (1991), which describes his meandering journey across the U.S.A. and its eventual conclusion in Seattle, where he now permanently resides.