18 DECEMBER 1982, Page 44

Alec Guinness

The most compulsive reading for me in 1982 has been Indecent Exposure, — an alarming account of Wall Street plus Hollywood by New York journalist David McClintick. A weighty book, in raw prose, but hard to put down. Infinitely more elegant was the re-issue of Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time to Keep Silence (Chatto & Windus) and volume IV (which I hope will not be the last) of the Lyttelton Hart-Davis Letters'(John Murray). For sheer novel en- joyment I greatly liked William Boyd's An Ice Cream War (Hamish Hamilton)