A.J.Liebling, is an American Cyril Connolly whose passion, which kept him away from the typewriter, was eating. Liebling describes his life and the people he met by comparing them to the food he was eating.

"The New Yorker sent [A.J.] Liebling to Paris in October 1939 to cover the war in Europe. The assignment lasted through the liberation of Paris and a few weeks thereafter, and here for the first time Liebling's war dispatches ... are arranged to form a coherent narrative"--Jacket.