Over the course of a decade, James Campbell wrote nearly fifty profiles for The Guardian. In Round About Midnight, he has collected and reworked seven of them--Seamus Heaney, V. S. Naipaul, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Hilary Mantel, Shirley Hazzard, J. G. Ballard, and Gore Vidal--along with three memoir-essays about literary figures that he knew personally, James Baldwin, Eddie Linden, and Jim Haynes. Taken together, these profiles and essays offer a view on to a literary landscape which the attention-sapping deluge of gadgetry and tech has made hazier in the intervening years.