Ludovic Kennedy
I greatly enjoyed — as I'm sure all lovers of R.L.S. will — Dead Man's Chest by Nicholas Rankin, (Faber, £9.95) in which the author follows the trail of the master from Heriot Row via France, Bourne- mouth and California to Samoa, and finds all sorts of unexpected things to tell us along the way. John Miller's Friends and Romans (Fourth Estate, £12.95), published more than 40 years after the event, is one of the best wartime escape stories I have read: the author's descriptions of life among the Italian villagers who sheltered him and of his stay in occupied Rome are so vivid that one feels one is there with him. Very different but equally impressive is Bob Woffinden's Miscarriages of Justice, (Hodder, £14.95) a detailed account of some of the worst of them (Evans, Hanrat- ty, Luvaglio, Cooper and McMahon, etc) over the past 40 years. The most overrated book was Margaret Drabble's The Radiant Way (Weidenfeld, £10.95).
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