This volume of key essays explores, with intellectual and emotional rigour, the nature of values and their place in the humanities.

As Ernst Gombrich writes in the preface, 'There are moments in the life of an academic when he feels prompted to get up from his university chair and mount the pulpit ... '

Ranging in subject matter from the philosophy of Hegel to wartime propaganda broadcasts, to the future of museums and the role of reason and feeling in the study of art, Professor Gombrich dynamically argues for the ideals of tolerance and pluralism and against the idols of determinism and relativism that would threaten all forms of the very culture that defines us as human beings.