THE LAST VOYAGE and Other Stories by James Hanley (Harvill; #9.99)

On his death in 1985 at the age of 84, James Hanley earned a Times obituary headlined Neglected Genius of the Novel, which, though well deserved, didn't do much to reverse his neglect. Given his penchant for old-fashioned realist narrative and his unvarying concentration upon the lives of the poor, nothing ever will; but what is a paperbacks column for if not to speak up for the deserving dead?

Hanley was the British Jack London, the working-class Joseph Conrad, and the B Traven of the sea - all of which elements are reflected in this collection of four long-short stories and a novella, which deal with seagoing dangers, the horrors of trench warfare in the First World War, and the torment of the condemned cell. His descriptions of the lives of the wretched of the earth must strike the modern reader as shockingly real compared to what George Steiner calls the ''lacy domesticities'' of present-day English fiction. This was what life was like for the great majority before the Second World War, and Hanley made superb art of it.

ANGRY WHITE PYJAMAS: An Oxford Poet Trains with the Tokyo Riot Police by Robert Twigger (Indigo; #6.99)

From the title of this book and the jocular photographs on its covers you might expect a wisecracking, self-deprecating kind of travel comedy in the manner of Bill Bryson; but you would be wrong and disappointed, as I suspect Robert Twigger's publishers must have been when he handed in his manuscript.

Although it begins as a knockabout culture-clash comedy about three young white men sharing a Tokyo flat and making a living from Teaching English as a Foreign Language, within 30 pages it develops into a lengthy and irony-free account of how the author, motivated by his perceived lack of physical fitness and self-discipline, took up aikido and tortured himself into major-league expertise in the arcane crafts of stylised violence.

One keeps expecting him to wink at the reader to signify that he isn't taking these obsessive physical jerks and the accompanying crypto-fascist, yogi-bogey militarist mysticism seriously, but he never does; he means it, man. God save Japan from Western friends like this one.

SELECTED WRITINGS by Izaak Walton (ed. Jessica Martin) (Carcanet; #9.95)

If for no other reason, this collection would be welcome as providing an opportunity to read a book - The Compleat Angler - whose title everyone recognises but hardly anyone has read in the past 300 years. Despite its (to modern eyes) quaint and artificial form as an argumentative dialogue between a hunter and a fisherman, the benign English clergyman's panegyric on angling makes droll and sprightly reading, but better and more illuminating than this engaging curiosity are the essays upon contemporary poets and writers, including John Donne, George Herbert, and Ben Jonson, that earned for Walton the title of the Father of English Biography.

Walton has an innocent taste for gossip and tattle-tale that puts one in mind of his friend the great John Aubrey, of Brief Lives fame; and everything in this hugely entertaining selection of prose and poetry is informed by his fascinating experience of having lived (1593-1683) through a century of Reformation, revolution, and Restoration. No collection is Compleat without it.