Scenes and Apparitions begins where its predecessor, Splendours and Miseries, left off. It covers a period of Roy Strong's life from 1988 to 2003.

Shaking off the shackles of public life, Roy was free for the first time to reinvent himself, leaving behind the political and cultural machinations of the art world. Left with little to live on, he turned his hand to what came his way, first as a consultant to the Canary Wharf development; then as a television and radio presenter; and finally as a full-time writer of books on the nation's history and civilisation, as well as on garden design and history.

The urge to keep a diary ebbed and flowed and continues to be nothing other than sporadic - when this or that prods his pen to describe a scene or a person. This volume of his diaries is an unmissable record of how a citizen at the close of the second Elizabethan age observed and chronicles his own world, as the last decade of the twentieth century gave way to the first decade of the twenty-first.