An introductory guide covering a very small selection of the insect species known from Northern Europe (including Britain and Ireland).

Introductory chapters cover biology, collecting and preserving, and classification. An illustrated key to orders follows on p44-50. (There is an alternative pictorial guide to groups inside the front and back covers.)

The main body of the work consists of very readable accounts of each order with a survey of the major families and often further keys. Double-sided pages of colour paintings with facing pages of text are interspersed, as close to the appropriate position as book design permits. Four plates of Lepidoptera larvae can be found at the back. Species NOT found in Britain and/or Ireland are marked with a triangle (the opposite convention from "Insects of Britain and Western Europe" by the same author!).

Useful for the range of insects illustrated, but should not be relied upon for anything more than approximate identification because there are so many more species that are not mentioned.