Extracts from the Red Notebooks Matthew Engel Macmillan, 160pp, £9.99 ISBN 0330449540

It is often the scribblings writers never intend to publish that tell us the most about them. It’s surprising, then, that journalist Matthew Engel’s collection of notes – meticulously made over 28 years – should reveal so little of the man holding the Biro.

As a budding Guardian scribe in 1979, Engel began jotting down everything he read and heard that interested, tickled or touched him. He became obsessed: by 2006, he found himself with 36 red Silvine notebooks crammed full of quotations, facts, poems and jokes. He vaguely hoped his young son Laurie might like to read them. But when Laurie died of cancer at 13, Engel chose to publish a selection to raise money for charity.

The result is an entertaining miscellany, and probably the only book to quote George Orwell, Saddam Hussein and Charlotte Church in quick succession. But the selected jottings have been jumbled into loose topics with frustratingly little context.

There are, however, rare but affecting personal snippets: Engel’s father on his experience of war; part of a friend’s letter expressing condolences after Laurie’s death; a short chapter devoted to his son’s jokes. It is an unusual, if diverting, anthology, laced with reminders of the grief of which it was borne.

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