Peter Levi
The most overestimated book this year has been The Oxford Shakespeare (£29.50), now completed with a third volume which I find grossly inadequate and worse every time I consult it. The most underestimated books must include the Penguin Collected Poems of Dom Moraes (£3.95) with a large selection of wonderful new poems. Few poets have achieved such a successful return after so long a silence. He is one of the best writers alive. P. J. Kavanagh's People and Places, 1975-87 (Carcanet, £12.95) is a masterly selection of shorter and longer prose pieces that find enthralling and have re-read often. In the end, I think this is the best living essayist at his best. (Yet the book has gone virtually unreviewed.) Candi a McWilliam in her Case of Knives (Bloomsbury, £12.95) wrote a first novel I find uncom- fortably impossible to forget. But this has been a good year for books, so it is hard to select.
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