These Oxford anthologies come up with regularity and are usually professionally - and unfussily - edited. This one begins with two Dickens excerpts and ends, rather incongruously but courageously, with Elizabeth Bishop's poem Questions of Travel. The bulk of the choices are equally unconventional: they include Waugh, Rebecca West, Flannery O'Connor, V.S. Pritchett, Paul Theroux, Jack Kerouac, Rachel Ingalls. Two Irish writers manage to get included, Elizabeth Bowen and Benedict Kiely ("A Journey to the Seven Streams").