Fire: 1934-1937, by Anais Nin (Peter Owen, £13.95 in UK)

You can regard these "unpublished, unexpurgated" excerpts from Nin's diary as either intimate psychological confessions, or as a chronique scandaleuse; but either way I found them pretty tedious. As a self-appointed femme fatale, she had a husband (Hugo Guiler) and two lovers, the writer Henry Miller and the analyst Otto Rank; while playing them off against one another she was avidly taking on a third lover in Paris, a Peruvian revolutionary. Thirty years ago, this type of literature might still have been considered daring or revelatory, but today it seems like Lady Chatterley's Lover or most of Miller's own writings - essentially novelettish in sensibility, and harder and harder to read with a straight face.