T.M. Fitzgerald and George Munster produced the paper each fortnight from 1958 until 1972, when its name and some of its spirit went into the Nation Review.

The journal attracted contributors already well known, among them W. MacmahonBall, Manning Clark, Max Harris and Cyril Pearl, and discovered writers such as Sylvia Lawson, Brian Johns and Bob Ellis.

Robert Hughes became an art critic in its pages, and Harry Kippax the country's most respected theatre reviewer. Some people who wrote pseudonymously are here unmasked for the first time.

This book is for old readers who still miss Nation, and for the young who never knew it. K.S. Inglis, himself a contributor, has chosen the items and written a history of the journal, to make a retrospective exhibition, a chronicle of the time, and a bedside or poolside book for the 1990s.