At last: an antidote to all those books about motherhood and apple pie, though it isn't all plain sailing and shared jugs of ale in this magpie collection of bits and pieces, which places Jean-Paul Sartre next to Flann O'Brien and juxtaposes Homer and Quentin Crisp. Here are new fathers, bad fathers, absent fathers, bereaved fathers and those who would really rather not be fathers at all; my own favourite, filed under the heading "Petitions, admonition, advice and exasperation", is a telling sentence from the diary of the Rev Ralph Josselin, 1616-1683: "God good in preserving An in a milke bowle, and Jane from swouning who let her fall in, and, John in falling from ye top of ye school staires; God give his angels charge over us."