Britain & Japan: Biographical Portraits, Volume VI, compiled and edited by Hugh Cortazzi, Global Oriental, Kent, 2007, 368 pp., £60 (cloth)

This book is the latest (and, sadly, probably the last) of the volumes about Anglo-Japanese relations that have been sponsored by the Japan Society of London since 1991. The series, together with two companion volumes on British and Japanese diplomats, now comprises nearly 250 essays. This volume contains an invaluable index for the series as a whole.

Edited by the indefatigable Sir Hugh Cortazzi, who also contributes six of the essays, this volume is characterized above all by variety. The 34 essays cover politicians, royalty, businessmen, scholars, writers and artists.

At one end, we have scholarly studies, such as Peter O'Connor's piece on the journalist Hugh Fulton Byass, which actually manages to cram an account of the fortunes of the entire English language press before World War II in Japan into 12 pages; at the other extreme, there is Roger Buckley's elegant meditation of under five pages on the difficulty of knowing just what experiences the cult British novelist, Angela Carter, actually had in Japan.