Showing the sights

• The New Oxford Book of 16th-Century Verse edited by Emrys Jones
  Oxford, 809 pp, £25.00, June 1991, ISBN 0 19 214126 0

The anthologist’s job is or ought to be a happy one. Less so the reviewer’s, especially if the reviewer is himself or herself an anthologist, and sick and tired of the standard ploys. One reviewer of a recent anthology on the subject of friendship deplored the insufficiency of homoerotic material; well, the editors had striven to avoid eroticism of any sort, as far as was possible. Another complained that the editors had neglected feminist fiction: a just observation, albeit in extenuation it might be pleaded that the theme was friendship, not unfriendliness.