The work is divided into four sections as follows:
"Dew on the Garlic Leaf" contains mainly essays of personal experience, starting with a continuation of the autobiographical element of Enemies of Promise
"Divers of Worship" comprises mainly reviews of works associated with past writers
"Nothing if not Critical" includes reviews of contemporary writers of the modern movement
"The House of Two Doors" consists of articles about topics other than writers
Connolly derived the title from Pope's poem on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu:
"What are the gay parterre, the chequer'd shade
The morning bower, the ev'ning colonnade
But soft recesses of uneasy minds
To sigh unheard in, to the passing winds?"
He also had in mind the surrealist work of Chirico.
References
Cyril Connolly The Evening Colonnade Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich 1973