A Good-looking Corpse, by Mike Nicol (Minerva, £7.99 in UK)

Now that South Africa is, in theory at least, a free society, the long dark years of apartheid have already acquired a certain quasi historical nimbus, and this book focuses on a group or circle of talented, rebellious, high spirited young blacks roughly identified with the magazine Drum, which had a brilliant though rather short career in the 1950s. Journalism, jazz, political activism, dancing, alcohol and fast living generally were their passions, and they lived in a world of real as well as potential violence, with frequent gang killings and incessant police bullying and brutality. The numerous period photographs add a quality of immediacy and nostalgia combined - though the latter noun hardly applies to the photos of naked prisoners in Johannesburg jail being forced to perform the "monkey dance", which according to the caption was calculated to "dislodge anything hidden in the rectum".