Nightmares, says Bertrand Russell, are very revealing phenomena, for they represent people's fears that their dominant passion will not be fulfilled. So if you take as diverse a group of people as Stalin, Eisenhower, Dean Acheson, the Queen of Sheba, and Dr Bowdler (notorious Shakespearian censor) - not to mention an anonymous mathematician, psychoanalyst, metaphysician, and existentialist - then their respective nightmares ought to tell us a great deal about human nature, if only we knew them. And now we do, with Lord Russell's help! To say more would be to give away the fun - and the shocks; for these are warnings are well as fantasies.

The other stories in this book agreeably mix satire and whimsy.