In Two Minds advances a single argument: that reading and writing are collaborative ventures with past and future. Tradition is a living resource.

Sisson considers literary vocation, the act of reading, the practice of real criticism and the comedy of some kinds of academic criticism. He writes about authors he has translated - Horace, Dante and Virgil among them - reflecting on their development and what their work means today. His major essays on the English writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including Marvell and Swift who are especially near to his heart, pursue the theme; and so, crucially, do his accounts of the modern classics such as Hardy, Pound and Ford Madox Ford.

Sisson's essays often begin, as Dr Johnson's did, with an evocation of the writer's life, especially the formative years, and move on to assess the work with the eye of one who is himself 'one of the greatest translators of our time' (Jasper Griffin, The Times Literary Supplement), a novelist, and a major poet.