Streets Ahead, by Keith. Waterhouse (Sceptre, £6.99 in UK)

Keith Waterhouse is a very funny writer, and this second volume of autobiography takes up where the first, City Lights, left off, with the fledgling hack arriving bag and baggage in Fleet Street - only to be dispatched almost at once to interview the survivor of a shipwreck, a sailor whose luckless companion had been swept overboard shortly before the rescue operation. But would a Fleet Street news editor send a green young reporter oiit on such a delicate mission without a few sage words of advice as to how he might proceed? Of course not. "Ask him," he growled at the quivering Waterhouse, "if he ate his pal." Ah, those were the days.