In his introduction to Bob Ellis: In his own words, Bob’s son Jack says of his father that ‘writing was his reason for being ... and through his writing he saw himself in conversation with the world’. That conversation stopped on 3 April 2016 with Ellis’s death from neuroendocrine cancer. He was seventy-three. For devotees or those merely curious about his life and times, the conversation continues in the pages of this book compiled by his wife and companion of fifty years, Anne Brooksbank.

The result is a loose autobiography ranging from childhood to final musings about endings and time passing encompassing Ellis’s thoughts on politics, war, friendships, and the wider world selected from blog posts, essays, journalism, diaries, speeches, and scripts (some unpublished).