BOOK

James Agate, The Selective Ego. You don’t have to be an intellectual to be a great diarist, and Agate, the debt-ridden, spectacularly self-involved drama critic of the London Sunday Times from 1923 until his death in 1947, wrote about the printable parts of his life with careful evasion (he was a brothel-loving homosexual given to masochistic practices of the grossest sort) and colossal panache. This compact selection of entries from Ego, the nine-volume series of diaries that Agate published in the Thirties and Forties, is a superlative bedside book, hugely amusing and easily readable in random snatches (TT).