The OK! world

The first day of April has come early to the literary world this year with the appearance of the New Penguin Encyclopedia 2003. It is a very good laugh, though not in the way the publisher or editor could have intended.

The 1,688 pages and 28,000 entries are a right-on summary of the contemporary world of telly celebrity. The biographies, easily the most intriguing aspect, range from Jennifer Aniston and Chris Tarrant to Kate Adie and Kate Winslet - with the occasional big hitter from history, a Julius Caesar or Teresa of Avila, thrown in. But you won't learn about the likes of Arundhati Roy, William Trevor or George Seferis, the first Greek Nobel laureate for literature. Entertaining the items on history, geography, politics and biography may be, but it is the entertainment of the bizarre.

Thoughtful and wellpresented one-volume biographical dictionaries, encyclopaedias and gazetteers are immensely valuable to us jobbing hacks. The centenary edition of the Chambers Biographical Dictionary (£35, 1,650 pages, 17,500 entries) has few equals - and it is a pity that the Penguin team, led by Dr David Crystal, didn't spend much time looking at it.

Single-volume encyclopaedias such as those put out by Cambridge University Press and Hutchinson are excellent value. I even mourn the passing of the Chronicle of the 20th Century and other Chronicle projects, first published by Longmans and then Dorling Kindersley. In the end, the D&K Year Books succumbed to the seductions of telly celebrity; it was the malign spell of the late Diana, Princess of Wales, I suspect. Alas, there are no year books being published now to remind the hacks of the what-where-when and who-whom of contemporary history.

History comes off particularly badly in the New Penguin Encyclopedia. Events are elided and muddled, and crucial personalities who shaped our times are left out altogether. In the story of Vietnam we get no mention of the architect of victory, Vo Nguen Giap, the military genius of the century, who beat the French, Americans and South Vietnamese, and invented a new style of warfare.

The historians themselves don't get much joy either, which is surprising as they are beginning to enjoy the rewards of telly celebrity. Some are mentioned, the venerable Eric Hobsbawm as well as the Venerable Bede.

Sir Dennis Brogan was a charming and erudite raconteur, one of the first historians to appear on TV and radio. Thanks to Cambridge bias he gets an entry, as does FW Maitland - but Lord Acton, Sir Ernst Gombrich, AJP Taylor, EP Thompson and Leopold Von Ranke, the founding father of the modern history business, and its new star, Simon Schama, are left out.

The who's in, who's out, game can be played infinitely, and is one of the few pleasures of this tome. Among the artists we have Damien Hirst (naturally), but no Tracey Emin; we are given Francis Bacon and Barbara Hepworth, but no Lucian Freud, Gillian Ayres, Elisabeth Frink, Howard Hodgkin or Edward Hopper - you get the drift, so I won't bang on.

But it's in the world of showbiz and television journalism (aren't they the same?) the real source of inspiration is revealed. It is the world of Hello! and OK!, full of our new pseudoroyals, the Beckhams, the Winslets and Paltrows, the Dimblebys, Adies, Rantzens and Paxmans. We have the Radio 4 Today team - that satrapy of television on the wireless - Naughtie, Humphrys, and the less than household name of Peter Hobday, but MacGregor is omitted. Kate Adie and Martin Bell are in, but there's no place for Jon Snow, John Simpson, Max Hastings, Maggie O'Kane, Ernie Pyle, Ed Murrow and Lee Miller - who have done more for contemporary journalism than all those cited put together.

The mystery of this great tome is who oversaw this chunk of literary crazy paving. The introduction invites readers to email Penguin with comments. Best advice I can give is start again - but it does make an elegant, though expensive book end or doorstop.