15 NOVEMBER 2008, Page 39

Byron Rogers

The Welsh Academy Encyclopaedia of Wales, (University of Wales Press, £65) for its scholarship, also for its sense of proportion, as in comments such as this on Roy Jenkins, ‘[He was] a ferocious croquet player’, and on Queen Victoria who ‘spent only seven nights in Wales, compared with seven weeks in Ireland and seven years in Scotland’.Halfway to Venus (Umbrella, £12.99) by Sarah Anderson, with whom I was once in love but who hit me over the head with a kettle, as the result of which I did not know until now how well she could write.