By the author of The Name of the Rose, this collection of essays offers advice on a wide range of unusual subjects - how to recognize a porno film, how to take an intelligent holiday, how not to talk about football, how to protect oneself from widows - as well as discussing weightier matters of history, politics, economics, literature and philosophy, in such pieces as On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1 and Three Owls on a Chest of Drawers.