Some people are one-book people; their lives and their workare dominated, usually with conscious complicity, by a single book.William Pitt, first Earl of Chatham (1708-78), seems to have found a"politician's vade-mecum" in Spenser's Faerie Queene.1 Umberto Eco,despite the vast range of reference apparent in all that he writes, in-sists that the guiding star of it all is…