This collection of reviews from a lifelong involvement in the intellectual life shows the late philosopher Bernard Williams (1929-2003) at his engaging best: lucid, cultivated and entirely serious in his determination to extract the essence from the matter he is discussing. Williams’s style of relentless interrogation, which permits neither vagueness nor evasion, invariably deepens the reader’s understanding not only of the question at issue but also of the intellectual networks in which it is embedded. Despite his busy life as a professor at respected universities on both sides of the Atlantic, as Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, and as a vociferous member of the old Labour establishment; and despite his own immensely important contribution to the subject in books that are on the shelves of all professional philosophers, Williams found time to study and review the works of his contemporaries, leaving all of them, it seems to me, with serious criticisms to answer, and at least one of them (Richard Rorty) with no hope of doing so.