. Some People, by Harold Nicolson (Constable, £9.95 in UK)

There is a rather musty, period odour about this book, though it is relatively short and, on the whole, fairly painless reading. Nicolson hit upon the idea of a series of quasi biographical sketches, involving people who in some cases were real and in other cases "made up" - though you may suspect that they had real tile models. The style is a cross between the mandarinesque one of Beerbohm and the informality of the 1920s. Nicolson was a man of the world and a professional diplomat - he was a member of the English delegation at Versailles in 1918-19 - who was much more convincing as an eye witness reporter than as an inventor creator.