Harold Nicolson's Diaries, edited by Nigel Nicolson (Flamingo, £9.99 in UK)

This is a condensed version of Nicolson's diaries and letters from 1930 to 1964, and they gain by the condensation: as I remember, the full versions contain much that is dated or gossipy, and a certain amount which is prejudiced snobbish and even objectionable. Though a minor writer, he had an eventful life and was even a junior minister in Churchill's wartime government one of the events he records during this period is a 1942 visit to de Valera in Dublin ("he is very simple, like all great men"). Dylan Thomas impressed him much less - "a fat little man, puffy and pinkish . . . I tell him that if he is to be employed by the BBC, he must promise not to get drunk. I gave him £1, as he is clearly at his wits end for money . . . He looks as if he will be washed out of poetry by whisky".