"Very flat, Norfolk", says a character in Noel Coward's "Private Lives"; and like the county in which the Rev. James Woodward spent most of his clerical life, his enormous daily diary is mostly very flat. That is not to say it is without incident, but it does mean that a sympathetic editor can, without great loss to the modern reader, make a principled single volume selection as has been done here. Much of its interest lies in the details of daily life and the interaction of personalities in what was a remote English farming community. As it was intended for and expected to be kept and read by his descendants there are none of the personal revelations of, for example, Boswell's "London Journal" or Pepys' diaries; but it has a charm of its own in its record of the daily life of a good man beset by irritations and cheered by kindnesses. ( )