1. In hospital — Obituary — Odyssey of Thomas Browne's skull — Anatomy lecture — Levitation — Quincunx — Fabled creatures — Urn burial
2. The diesel train — Morton Peto's palace — Visiting Somerleyton — The Cities of Germany in flames — The decline of Lowestoft — The former coastal resort — Frederick Farrar and the court of King James II
3. Fishermen on the beach — The natural history of the herring — George Wyndham Le Strange — A great herd of swine — The reduplication of man — Orbis Tertius
4. The Battle of Sole Bay — Nightfall — Station Road in The Hague — Mauritshuis — Scheveningen — The tomb of St Sebolt — Schiphol airport — The invisibility of man — The Sailors' Reading Room — Pictures from the Great War — The concentration camp at Jasenovac on the Sava
5. Conrad and Casement — The Boy Teodor — Exile in Volgda — Nowofastów — Death and interment of Apollo Korzensiowski — Sea and love-life — A winter journey — The heart of darkness — The panorama of Waterloo — Casement, the slave economy and the Irish question — Casement tried and executed for treason
6. The bridge over the Blyth — The Chinese court train — The Taiping rebellion and the opening of China — Destruction of the garden of Yuan Ming Yuan — The end of Emperor Hsien-feng — The Dowager Empress Tz'u-hsi — Mysteries of power — The town beneath the sea — Poor Algernon
7. Dunwich heath — Marsh Acres, Middleton — A Berlin childhood — Exile in England — Dreams, elective affinities, correspondences — Two strange stories — Through the rainforest
8. A conversation about sugar — Boulge Park — The FitzGeralds — The Bredfield nursery — Edward FitzGerald's literary ventures — A Magic Shadow-Show — Loss of a friend — Year's end — Last journey, summer landscape, tears of happiness — A game of dominoes — An Irish memory — On the history of the civil war — Arson, impoverishment and decline — Catherine of Siena — The entrepreneurial spirit and the cult of the pheasant — Through the desert — Secret weapons of destruction — In another country
9. The Temple of Jerusalem — Charlotte Ives and the Vicomte de Chateaubriand — Memoirs from beyond the grave — In Ditchingham churchyard — Ditchingham Park — The hurricane of 16th October, 1987
10. Thomas Browne's Museum Clausum — The silkworm moth, Bombyx mori — Origins and spread of sericulture — The Norwich silk-weavers — The melancholy of the weavers — Pattern books: nature and art — Sericulture in Germany — The extermination business — Mourning silk
