If you read one book this week Dictator by Robert Harris (Hutchinson) R285Further to last week's urgings about Dynasty, Tom Holland's history of imperial Rome, we're sticking with the territory with this concluding novel (after Imperium and Lustrum) in Harris's ambitious trilogy on Cicero, the Roman statesman and philosopher. This one covers the years in exile up to his assassination (58BC to 43BC) against a backdrop of anarchy and chaos. Compulsive "faction".The issueShort stories don't often feature in this column, but when they do, they do so with a hefty wallop. Or rather two hefty wallops. The new authoritative double volume Penguin Book of the British Short Story, edited by Philip Hensher, celebrates the full diversity and energy of the shortened form. The first volume traces its arc from Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift to the "golden age" of the fin de siècle and Edwardian periods with writers like Saki and John Buchan. The second volume moves from the 1920s to the present day.The local equivalent anthology is 2007's Omnibus of a Century of South African Short Stories (Jonathan Ball) edited by Michael Chapman. It's an impressive who's who of our literature: Olive Schreiner, Pauline Smith, Herman Charles Bosman, C Louis Leipoldt, Es'kia Mphahlele, Hennie Aucamp, Ahmed Essop, Njabulo S Ndebele, Peter Wilhelm, Sindiwe Magona, Marlene van Niekerk and Ivan Vladislavic, among others. Time for an updated edition, perhaps?Crash courseThere's a new miscellany of previously uncollected pieces by the late Christopher Hitchens. It is a pity, however, that And Yet...: Essays (Simon & Schuster) will only be released here in January, for it contains a blistering attack on the "collectivisation of gaiety" at Christmas and the crass commercialism of the holiday. Here, then, is a taste of his Grinch-like fury: "There are millions of well-appointed buildings all across the United States, most of them tax-exempt and some of them receiving state subventions, where anyone can go at any time and celebrate miraculous births and pregnant virgins all day and all night if they so desire. These places are known as ''churches", and they can also force passers-by to look at the displays and billboards they erect and to give ear to the bells that they ring. In addition, they can count on numberless radio and TV stations to beam their stuff all through the ether. If this is not sufficient, then god damn them. God damn them every one."The Kindle edition of And Yet... will be released next Thursday.The bottom line"If one has a grain of intelligence it is difficult to go on being serious about a character like James Bond. You [Raymond Chandler] after all write 'novels of suspense' - if not sociological studies - whereas my books are straight pillow fantasies of the bang-bang, kiss-kiss variety." - The Man With the Golden Typewriter: Ian Fleming's James Bond Letters, edited by Fergus Fleming (Bloomsbury)..