Ludovic Kennedy
For novels of scope and depth these days one has to look abroad, mostly to Australia and the Americas, and the one I enjoyed most was Tom Wolfe's exciting debut in fiction, The Bonfire of the Vanities (Cape, £12.95). Anthologies of one sort or another seem to be increasing and I warm- ly recommend Godfrey Smith's The Eng- lish Reader (Pavilion Books, £14.95) which he calls 'a partisan ragbag of gewgaws' but which I would say was a cupboard full of delightful surprises, from Haydon's de- scription of dinner with Wordsworth, Keats and Lamb to an account of the humiliations heaped on the only black man at Eton in 1914. And as a journalist and historian I am more grateful than I can say for the appearance of Chronicle of the Twentieth Century (Longman, £29.95), the 1,300-page ready-reckoner of every major British and world event from 1900 to the present day. Already I am beginning to wonder how I ever managed without it.
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