John O'Loughlin first got the idea of writing a collection of dialogues in 1978 after reading the French philosopher Diderot, one of the outstanding practitioners of the genre, and the results, several weeks later, were four fairly lengthy philosophical dialogues, which enabled him to continue developing the dualistic theories begun the previous year (1977) and included in both the mainly essayistic 'Between Truth and Illusion' (which contains his first ever philosophical dialogue) and the comparatively more aphoristic 'The Illusory Truth'. Their subject-matter ranges from book collecting as an art and the morality of films to the influence of astrology on writers and retrospective perspectives on history, and although they tend, on the basis of didactic disquisition rather than mere conversation, to be a touch one-sided, they are at least broad enough to be of some interest to the general reader, as well as deep enough to appeal to the more philosophically inclined.