Boyd: from New York to Nigeria photo: Jerry Bauer Any Human Heart By William Boyd Knopf, 498 pp., $24.95 Buy this book more books most popular most commented A G.I.'s Strange War Tale by Sean Gardiner Horacio Castellanos Moya Does the Twisted by Jed Lipinski The 2008 New Yorker Cartoon Standings by BRIAN PARKS Sasa Stanisic Turns Gruesome History Beautiful by Sidra Durst Rivka Galchen's Twisty Mistaken Identities by zach baron Trash Talking With Harvey Weinstein by Tony Ortega Coming and Then Licking It Up. Is This a Gay Thing? Savage Love by Dan Savage At Home With Competitive Swallowers Crazy Legs and Eater X by Andy Kropa Gene Simmons and the Whores He Admires La Dolce Musto by Michael Musto Columbia's Knotty Noose Problem by Graham Rayman The 'W.' Stands for 'War Criminal' (17) Nat Hentoff Scientology's Crushing Defeat (15) Tony Ortega Runnin' Scared: From Brooklyn, a Rap Campaign Against Tight Clothes (9) Runnin' Scared: Arcynta Ali Childs Runnin' Scared: The City Pitted Kids Against Artists in the East Village (6) Runnin' Scared: Chloé A. Hilliard Savage Love: My Boyfriend Almost Fathered a Lesbian Couple's Baby?!? (5) Savage Love: Dan Savage

Mountstuart's preamble assures the reader that, in editing his voluminous journals, he has allowed "no amendations aimed at conferring an unearned sagacity ('I don't like the cut of that Herr Hitler's jib')." His humor and candor make him an agreeable companion, as he acquires experiences and acquaintances, without purpose or a dull stretch. The scenery shifts smoothly and radically: London and Paris, wartime imprisonment in Switzerland, a dash from New York City to Iriki, Nigeria, to avoid a Polanski-esque accusation. A pre-Bond Ian Fleming is his WW II spymaster; Logan's contemporary Anthony Powell (1905-2000)—whose great 12-volume A Dance to the Music of Time this book sometimes resembles in small—appears as a fellow student in the Oxford Journal. Other notables include Woolf and Hemingway, the Duke of Windsor, assorted Abstract Expressionists, Baader-Meinhof. But Any Human Heart is far from a dressed-up Who's Who. Boyd has been developing the Mountstuart persona for some time: His straight-faced 1998 "monograph," Nat Tate: An American Artist, even featured a snapshot of the inveterate journal writer. (In an act of intra-oeuvre reciprocity, Any Human Heart's cover art is credited to the equally nonexistent Tate.) Along with the comedy, Boyd's empathy is everywhere evident, whether in describing his hero's soul-crushing loss of a family or the mundane melancholy of passport renewal ("These ten-year chunks that are doled out to you . . . are a cruel form of memento mori").

"Never say you know the last word about any human heart," runs the epigraph; the original line (from Henry James's Louisa Pallant) ends in an exclamation point. For whatever reason, Boyd has withheld that mark here, but he punctuates all that follows with an addictive intimacy, the tangible impress of life lived. Could you pass the parmesan?