Later, they visited Waterstones in Piccadilly, the world's largest bookshop ("Big place you have here," said the Duke, "Hope you can afford the rent") where the Queen looked at gardening books and chatted to a visiting Brownie pack.Then on to a school in Bethnal Green with the poet laureate Andrew Motion, and a trip to Pimlico Library. It was a more energetic working day than most members of the "British Book World" have experienced in years.. It's such a shame that it took Britain's newshounds 1600 years to find out how the art of autobiography sometimes works. "A leading academic and critic today stands accused of fabricating crucial details of his life, and of tampering with the facts about his past sexual relationships. The respected thinker, a top Algerian churchman known as Augustine, was confronted with evidence of omission, distortion and 'conflation' in the account of a 15-year illicit affair in his so-called Confessions. The randy bishop would only comment 'Oh Lord, give me continence and chastity – but not yet.'" Thus, one imagines, the Carthage Sunday Papyrus, c.400AD. It's such a shame that it took Britain's newshounds 1600 years to find out how the art of autobiography sometimes works.

Let us hope that their discovery has tickled Professor John Bayley. It might, all the same, be a good idea if the media executives who buy £30,000-plus extracts from memoirs to print the sexy bits read the whole work first. Early in Widower's House (Duckworth, £16.99) – his subtle and endearing final account of the loss of Iris Murdoch – Bayley admits that "only home was real. Mella and Margot [the spectral women who plague and tempt him] were like phantoms of harassment" (p.31). At the end, he even labours the point: "were they really just phantoms of my brain?" (p.189). How many hints must he drop?All honour, then, to the biographer Roger Lewis: in a review submitted well before the teacup-storm over "composite" figures broke, he wrote plainly that the women "are fantasy figures" who most resemble "wraiths and viragos in an Iris Murdoch novel. The widower is being haunted by his late wife's characters." As a lit-crit hole-in-one, that hits the Tiger Woods standard.Anyone amused by this spat will have great fun with a spoof Irish memoir by the Father Ted writer, Arthur Mathews.

Well-Remembered Days (Macmillan, £12.99) is the "autobiography" of Eoin O'Ceallaigh, a rambling bore who has spent his long life defending the values of Old Ireland against the dark satanic forces of pop, Protestants and promiscuity. Eoin, founder of the League of the Mother of God against Sin, is clearly the long-lost Hibernian cousin of Craig Brown's Wallace Arnold But he has lovely touches of his own. The arbiters of truth who scolded Bayley will no doubt agree with Eoin in his assault on that notorious conflater Frank McCourt, who (as we all know) made a mint out of shameless fibs about "his childhood days in Athlone at the turn of the century".. Nostalgia's drives are DJ Taylor's latest, and most catchily attractive, theme.

The pasts that shape us, that never let us go, are never recoverable except in memories doomed to go to sepia - and are only really revisitable in novels like this one. Nostalgia's drives are DJ Taylor's latest, and most catchily attractive, theme. The pasts that shape us, that never let us go, are never recoverable except in memories doomed to go to sepia - and are only really revisitable in novels like this one. The Comedy Man's story is told by Ted King, Yarmouth boy turned straight man in a once-famous comedy duo. He's now piecing together his life and entertainment career in London, following the death of his second wife Paula and his stage-partner of decades, Arthur Upward.In a most engaging mishmash of recollections, transcripts of interviews, comedy routines, essays on the meaning of comedy and old jokes, we get half a century of the King story. It moves from childhood in his parents' tobacconist-sweetshop through National Service in Cyprus, Soho clubland in the Sixties, the Seventies of three-day weeks, into Nineties Plumstead and all the city's grim now, with boneheaded Rottweiler-owners and tough single mums champing at the school gate. (King has a young son to look after.)King is well up - so he says - on the wandering Ngongi people of Africa, who are much on his mind as he tells of his own extended sojournings amid our national decline.