That's why there are so many hundreds of sugary and carbohydrate snacks on the market: they're the perfect product. And that, thinks Leith, explains why each time there's been a resurgence of interest in the Atkins diet, a powerful backlash swiftly followed. (Just as this book was published, sales of Atkins products were revealed to have crashed.) Low-fat diets promote the sale of low-fat products, but Atkins had nothing to sell and his low-carb message was potentially very damaging to the food industry: "Carbs are powerful. Carbs have influential friends."By cutting out carbs Leith eliminated his cravings, and has since maintained a fairly ideal weight of around 200lbs. After a while he reintroduced a moderate amount into his diet without feeling the urge to binge, and he even had the odd drink or two Then three or four more And a few lines of coke as well Then three or four more of those. And then he woke up in a stranger's house, bleeding and in a pool of his own vomit, realised that his compulsive behaviour was symptomatic of a deeper problem that Dr Atkins couldn't help him with, and booked himself into therapy.So carbs weren't really to blame for Leith's obesity.

As The Hungry Years closes we find him learning to blame his parents for sending him to be bullied at boarding school and for never noticing how abandoned he felt. About brightly packaged headache tablets, which are now consumed in such high quantities that they're giving people headaches. About mobile phones and Catherine Zeta Jones, Dawn French and French fries, about clothes, plastic surgery, self-help books, strip clubs, casual sex and drugs.Because the Atkins diet worked for him, because he absolves so many of our insecurities, because he writes so frankly and without pity about the most mortifying moments of his life, and perhaps, too, because he's a man writing about vulnerabilities that only women usually admit to, it ends up being a rather reassuring book So go on, buy yourself a copy. It really will make you feel much better about yourself, I promise.. Penelope Lively has never constructed her novels in, say, the Paul Theroux faux-autobiography manner, gamely slotting in her own adventures and fixations to the point where creator and creation grow indistinguishable. At the same time, a great deal of felt life has always flowed unobtrusively across their margins: scenes from her Egyptian childhood, the abiding interest in history and its artefacts; out-takes from her professional engagements. No reader of Next To Nature, Art (1983), her delicate expos?f a 1960s-style artistic community, could doubt that at some point in her career Lively had knocked up against a gang of vers libre poets and chicken-wire architects and decided to bite them good and hard.

Making It Up takes this process of self-cannibalisation a significant step further. Described by the Viking blurb-writer, with commendable prudence, as a "fiction" rather than a novel or short-story collection, it is less an account of the author's seventysomething years on the planet than a series of variations on them: eight sketches in which Lively seizes on some incident or motif from her own past (engagingly set out in the preface) and uses it as the stepping-off point for an exercise in the subjunctive. Only once, in a piece set in the Midlands town of "Hawkford", which I take to be Lichfield, is there a personal appearance. Understandably, this approach allows for wide discrepancies in theme and treatment. In "The Mozambique Channel", opening in pre-Alamein Egypt, a genial English nanny's first love affair is capped by the death of her six-year-old charge on the torpedoed troop ship taking them south to the Cape. "The Albert Hall", on the other hand, in which Lively projects the possible consequences of a sexual encounter from 1950 through into the modern age, makes do with brittle ironisings.