The urbane presenter of the television programmes Call My Bluff and Points Of View comes across as ultra-urbane in print, and 200 pages of the dry wit which is his trademark makes you long, at times, for a damp spot or two; still, he has peopled his memoires with figures of spiky humanity, from his gardener, the eccentric Mr Govier, to the gloomy psychiatrist R.D. Laing, succinctly summed up as resembling "a tap that had been turned off too tight". Most of his anecdotes are short, to the point, and amusing in a staccato sort of way, the following encounter with Jorge Luis Borges being fairly typical. Had he ever, Robinson wanted to know, thought of writing a novel? "The Argentinian fabulist was eating the soup which his landlady had brought him for lunch. 'No,' he said, 'and I've never thought of reading one, either'."A.W.Reviewers: Brian Fallon, Arminta Wallace