''1900'' is an odd bird, a hybrid of the coffee table and the memoir. The illustrations are wonderful - caricatures by Sem, snapshots of Queen Victoria in a Dublin donkey carriage, paintings by Bonnard and Sargent -and for the most part unfamiliar, too. The text is so loose-limbed as to flop about from Dame Rebecca's childhood anecdotes to reflections on Hindu backwardness to thoughts on the Boer War, Thomas Hardy, Cecil Rhodes and anti-Semitism.

It was, of course, a very good year, 1900, and we would expect Dame Rebecca to nod in the direction of Picasso and Lenin, Mahler and Conrad. But did you know that the physicist Max Born was the grandfather of the singer Olivia Newton-John? This is the sort of information that makes me smile; this whole meandering, opinionated, irresponsible book made me smile and think that most of the people in it deserved to be punished.