Root Books

• Henry Root’s A-Z of Women by William Donaldson
  Weidenfeld, 180 pp, £7.95, July 1985, ISBN 0 297 78593 1

Before I got to the fourth and latest book in the exhausted but inexhaustible Henry Root corpus, I allowed myself some shallow research on his previous works. The first was memorable enough, even without the help of a library. The Henry Root Letters was not so much a work of tenacious parody or stomping satire as a pretty good leg-pull: which may be why the London Review of Books, when the letters were published in 1979, called them ‘a disgrace to publishing’.