In this latest, typically copious collection of essays, reviews and other occasional pieces, Grayling's themes include the necessity for atheism in the modern world, the looming threat of China and Putin's Russia, the folly of the West's military interventions in the Middle East and Afghanistan, the need for genuine equality for women and members of the gay community, and the educational value of the sciences and humanities.

Grayling offers eloquent rather than breathtaking advocacy for these causes, an exception being a dark assessment of China, disturbing in its evocation of an astonishingly vast system of slave labour that underpins current Western living standards and the appalling trade in human organs harvested from executed prisoners.

One topic on which Grayling takes a somewhat provocative stance is military drones. Grayling lends support to the regular use of drones by the Obama administration to assassinate its targets, a practice that, as critics have pointed, kills civilians and represents the state-sanctioned, extrajudicial killing of foreign nationals living outside the United States. Grayling argues that drones are less unethical than alternative methods and that the notion that drone warfare, simply because it is remote, is somehow cowardly is ridiculous. While drone strikes undoubtedly kill innocent civilians, he maintains that they cause much less death and destruction than the indiscriminate mass bombings of past wars.