Timothy Fuller of Colorado College is one of the world’s foremost scholars on the work of the British philosopher Michael Oakeshott. Fuller was also a friend of Oakeshott’s for the last sixteen years of the latter’s life, for a time shared an office with him, and later took frequent trips to England to converse with him. As such, this collection of Fuller’s essays (many previously published) on Oakeshott is a welcome addition to the ever-increasing volume of secondary literature on the thinker.

The book opens with a charming reminiscence of Fuller’s various encounters with Oakeshott, beginning when in 1959, as a student at Kenyon College, Fuller first read Oakeshott. He recalls Oakeshott “smoking continuously” as he repeatedly revised his papers for the History of Political Thought seminar at the London School of Economics and recounts how they would go out to eat at Luigi’s or Mon Plaisir afterward. When Fuller visited Oakeshott at his Dorset cottage, he saw him drive his 1958 MGB “at excessive speed through the hedgerows” and learned that he was a skilled cook and gardener.

This book consists of sixteen essays by Fuller, arranged in chronological order. The first essay after the introduction is previously unpublished and is also the first of Fuller’s writings on Oakeshott. In it, Fuller takes up Oakeshott’s concept of “modes” of experience, as described in Oakeshott’s first book, Experience and Its Modes (1933). (This idea is in the background of all of Oakeshott’s later work.) In brief, a mode is the whole of experience viewed from a partial, abstract perspective. Science, for instance, is the mode that views experience through the lens of measurable quantity; practice is the mode that understands experience as the continual attempt to replace what is with what ought to be; and history is the mode that views the present world as a repository of evidence for a world gone by.