The wisdom of her insight into human vanity did not always carry over into her memoirs and personal essay writing, where she could come across as thin-skinned, snobbish and defensive.

The book veers - at times somewhat troublingly - between memoir and fiction, capitalizing, no doubt on the renaissance of the personal essay genre, born out of blogging and online self-publishing.

In its objectivity, a survey article may lie somewhere between a personal essay, and an encyclopedia article.

The final section, full of explicitly personal essays, therefore comes as a relief: her best ones move in a widening direction.

This was not an overview, as suggested by the title, but a series of commissioned personal essays from eminent types exploring one aspect of a particular year.