Robert Lynd became one of the most graceful and favoured writers of the early century, and had some thirty books published in his lifetime. The essays in Galway of the Races represent his writings on Ireland (Protestant and Papish, with accounts of Connolly, Kettle, Griffith, Shaw, Yeats and Joyce), on literature (from Donne to Hazlitt, Keats, Turgenev and Chekhov) and on life at large (the Great War, the British Museum, smoking, sport, walking and other pleasures).