Iain Finlayson

THE TWELVE CAESARS by Matthew Dennison (Atlantic, 386pp; £20)

Short biographies can be long in their influence: John Aubrey’s ‘Brief Lives’ and Lytton Strachey’s ‘Eminent Victorians’ looked to the model of historical biography set by Suetonius in ‘The Lives of the Caesars’ some 1900 years ago. In his assessments of twelve Roman from Julius to Domitian, who ruled from 49 BC to AD 96 and took Rome from a Republic to an Empire, he preferred a more objective, less moralistic tone over traditional eulogy, though his narratives are equally notable for their dramatic set pieces and lively anecdotal gossip. Dennison does not intend to correct or contradict Suetonius, but he is able to revisit the great work with the benefit of “additional primary sources and associated secondary material”. His aim, successfully accomplished in rather a stately prose, is to explore, in twelve portraits, the telling facets of fallible men too often corrupted by immense power and destroyed by hubris.

STRANDS: A Year of Discoveries on the Beach by Jean Sprackland (Cape, 242pp; £16.99)

Inspired and a little intimidated by Alain de Botton’s definition of the ‘travelling mindset’, poet Jean Sprackland gave herself the year before marrying and moving to London to walk, again and again, in all seasons, the short shoreline between Southport Pier and Formby Point. Ainsdale Sands is not, she admits, the prettiest or most dramatic patch of the North West coast of England, nor is it the most unspoiled, but it is not uninteresting. Curiosity illuminated her findings and receptivity enlightened her discoveries: birds and racehorses, sand and seaweed, flotsam and jetsam, objects abandoned and buried, wrecks that rear up suddenly only to sink back to the sea bed, beguiled her beachcombing mindset. With clarity and candour, in the natural voice of a modern storyteller, she tells what she sees at the intersection of herself and whatever is delivered to her by the tide. Coincidence is a fine thing.

THE GEEK MANIFESTO: Why Science Matters by Mark Henderson (Bantam, 326pp; £18.99)

Geeks, once lonely and isolated in their culturally quirky passion for science, are coming together on social networking sites to be out, loud and proud as significant pressure groups for social change. What do they want? The scientific approach to contemporary problems to be adopted as an element in the construction of public policy! When do they want it? When there is sufficient evidence-based, peer-reviewed data to promote the scientific method for political and public acceptance! But seriously: Henderson and his supporters make a valid point when they identify a woeful ignorance, not to say wilful misunderstanding, of science by politicians, the media and powerful vested interests. The Geek Manifesto urges scientists and their supporters to become politically active, to apply the methodology of rational thinking to the process of government, to expose pseudo-science and – in broad terms – restore the Age of Scientific Enlightenment. It’s cool to be geeky.

ON THE FRONT LINE: The Collected Journalism of Marie Colvin by Marie Colvin (Harper Press, 554pp; £16.99)

On the front line usually means in the line of fire, and it was there, reporting from Sri Lanka, that Marie Colvin was blinded in one eye. The black eye patch, as much a mark of physical vulnerability as a badge of brave, buccaneering spirit, became iconic. She was killed in February this year, reporting the violence in Syria for The Sunday Times. The tributes paid to her by colleagues confirmed her long-standing reputation as courageous, consistent in her personal convictions and steadfast in her dedication to reporting humanely and honestly from the world’s danger zones. In this anthology of her best work, in ‘Courage knows no gender’, she wrote frankly in 1999 about herself as a woman war correspondent and quoted Martha Gellhorn who advised reporters to “Beware of the Big Picture”. Humanity, for Marie Colvin, was at ground level, in the detail. Respect for moral decisions, she believed, has no gender.

DARWIN’S GHOSTS: In Search of the First Evolutionists by Rebecca Stott (Bloomsbury, 386pp; £25)

Charles Darwin, like most theorists and artists, stood on the shoulders of giants. ‘On the Origin of Species’ is highly regarded today as an seminal piece of work, but upon first publication in 1859 it not only divided public opinion but was criticised as deriving intellectually from previous natural philosophers. Darwin was aware of the debts he owed his predecessors, and attempted to give credit where it was due by establishing a line of intellectual descent. He failed in this admirable ambition, but Rebecca Stott has taken up the challenge and, aided by modern resources, has identified a long lineage of Darwin’s known forebears, including ‘proto-evolutionists’ about whom Darwin could not have been aware. In an immensely stimulating, impressively researched and intellectually exciting book, she affirms Darwin as one of the greatest evolutionists of evolution theory and recovers valuable evidence from his shadow to confirm the consistency of that theory throughout human history.

THE PLANTAGENETS: The Kings Who Made England by Dan Jones (Harper Press, 632pp; £25)

If you thought ‘Game of Thrones’, inspired by the War of the Roses, was gory and grotesque, look back at the dynastic history of the Plantagenets who could have given lessons (none of them good) to kings to come. From 1154 to 1399, from Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine to the usurpation of Richard II’s throne by Henry Bolingbroke, eight generations of the Plantagenet line ruled England and evolved the templates of a modernised bureaucratic state. As an energetic narrative historian, Dan Jones combines a dramatic instinct for the murderous intrigues, brutal images and chivalric icons of the high Middle Ages with academic respect for a historical reality every bit as jaw-dropping. Reluctantly, he ends his epic just as York and Lancaster square up to wage bloody civil war. But, having set these wolves at each other’s throats, he promises to complete the Plantagenet saga in a second spirited book.

THE MAN WITHIN MY HEAD: Graham Greene, My Father and Me by Pico Iyer (Bloomsbury, 248pp; £16.99)

When Pico Iyer, a globalised writer on literature, politics, culture and religion, spontaneously begins a story about his schooldays, he associates the images and feelings with autobiographical notes by Graham Greene, and thus invites Greene the novelist into his mind. Examining what they have in common is the theme of this personal memoir by way of biography. Ostensibly, Greene becomes a father figure in kindly contrast with Iyer senior, an academic, idealist philosopher. Greene, as a constant intellectual companion, dominated Iyer’s travels, influenced his thinking and now and again seriously irritated him to the point that he wished never to hear another word in his head from Greene who provided enlightenment but also provoked deeper shadows. In truth, there are three men in this virtuoso memoir: Iyer comes to a better understanding of himself, the virtual man in his head and, very movingly, the lifetime bond with his real father.

AN APPLE A DAY: A Memoir of Love and Recovery from Anorexia by Emma Woolf (Summersdale, 256pp; £8.99)

In flight from food, Emma Wolff had to fight to recover her appetite for an adequate diet and fulfil her desire, as a thirty-something woman, to sustain a loving relationship with her partner and conceive a child with him. The contrast between her privileged life and her personal misery is strikingly established in this book before she begins to deal positively with her long-standing “addiction to hunger”. First, she had to identify it as a dysfunction, as a form of extreme self-control and consistent self-punishment, and admit it not just to herself but to others. She did this very publicly by writing a confessional article which was continued as a regular column in ‘The Times’. ‘Coming out’ about her condition and narrating the process of recovery has been as much agony as therapy, but it has been a needful exercise for the writer and her support group of readers.

WHY SPENCER PERCEVAL HAD TO DIE: The Assassination of a British Prime Minister by Andro Linklater (Bloomsbury, 296pp; £18.99)

The title is telling. It was a matter of justice, as he perceived it, why John Bellingham deliberately and premeditatedly shot Spencer Perceval, the Prime Minister, in Parliament on 11 May 1812. The event, says Linklater, was as shocking in its day as the assassination of John Kennedy in 1963. Indeed the familiar obfuscation around the murder of Perceval is a notable thread in Linklater’s forensic examination of the act, the trial and the political situation that inspired widespread hatred of the over-powerful Perceval and led the political establishment to fear violent revolution. He also fully investigates Bellingham’s long-standing complaint against the government and Perceval, concluding that he was fully aware of his actions and by no means the ‘deranged’ assassin that politicians and the press at the time

THE A303: Highway to the Sun by Tom Fort (Simon & Schuster, 344pp; £14.99)

‘Highway to the Sun’ as a title has rather a desperate air, rather like an ad man’s invention of Torquay as ‘The English Riviera’. The A303, ninety miles from Basingstoke in Hampshire to Honiton in Devon, is not Route 66. It’s more Ford Anglia than Little Red Coupe. It’s not a likely location for a dramatic road movie (try freewheeling through a traffic jam) but it has a domestic Ealing comedy character all its own. Its mostly famous, says Fort, as “the road that passes Stonehenge”, which gives him a cue to travel the road back in time, beyond its recent incarnation as a utopian dream of a great arterial route to the south west, to the Roman roads and drovers’ paths that preceded it. Fortunately, Fort’s journalistic instincts for a good story quickly snap him back to modern times and the quirky, quaint reality of life on the road.

CHASING VENUS: The Race to Measure the Heavens by Andrea Wulf (Heinemann, 304pp; £18.99)

Publishers got hot for science writing when ‘Longitude’ by Dava Sobel took off unexpectedly as a long-term bestseller in 1995. Human efforts to map, calculate, witness and record the phenomena of nature are often less collaborative than competitive, and the originality of Sobel’s book was to personalise and dramatise a significant advance in natural science. Andrea Wulf’s story of how astronomers of the Enlightenment hoped to measure the distance from the earth to the sun by observing the transit of Venus internationally on 6 June 1761, and again on 3 June 1769, is another fine example of such scientific storytelling. Her book coincides with a rare transit of Venus across the face of the sun in June this year. From the original inspiration of Edmund Halley that led to the active cooperation of Captain Cook, Benjamin Franklin and even Catherine the Great, the great enterprise is narrated with elegant expertise.

ON THE EVE: The Jews of Europe before the Second World War by Bernard Wasserstein (Profile, 554pp; £25)

Wasserstein, a notable writer on Jewish history, will disturb some well-established and widely-held views with his thesis that, pre-War, Jewish culture in Europe was in retreat. Mostly, he says, this was due to widespread and long-standing anti-Semitism, but the Jews themselves were victims of their own success both materially in business and creatively in the arts. The more hostility this evoked, the more they began to secularise themselves. As citizens, they began to embrace the values and privileges of national life and thus the “cultural glue that had long bound Jews together was losing its cohesive power.” This process of internal decay loosened collective resistance, and so the external threat to European Jewry was all the more effective. Their existential crisis is the focus of a controversial book which presents European Jews in the 1930s as less passive in their downfall and as actors in their own tragic history.

AS CONSCIOUSNESS IS HARDENED TO FLESH: Diaries 1964-1980 by Susan Sontag (Hamish Hamilton, 532pp; £18.99)

Susan Sontag’s life played itself out as a proper three act drama of self-creation, of continuous learning on many levels. In the first volume of her diaries, she is in development as a writer, and moral critic. In this, the second, she is fully functioning as an American (though European-influenced) public intellectual and political activist. A third volume remains to be published. She resisted autobiography, and her public writings are significantly short on personal disclosure. Though David Rieff, editor of his mother’s diaries, would have preferred that she had written more out of joy than bitterness (the poverty of her self-regard contrasts with the richness of her humanity) these notes to herself, associative and erudite, express the fullness and diversity of her intellectual curiosity. They are revelatory in the most profound sense: they are existential fragments, self-selected thoughts, emotions, reactions and, often, quotations from others, arising in one of the most remarkable minds of the 20^th century.

THE BARONESS: The Search for Nica, the Rebellious Rothschild by Hannah Rothschild (Virago, 310pp; £20)

Pannonica (known as Nica), sister of the third Baron Rothschild and the scientist Miriam Rothschild, was the scapegrace of the family. Her story is, frankly, banal in its basics: well connected young debutante comes out in society, marries well, seems set for a wealthy but dull life, falls in love, runs off, falls into bad company and worse habits and comes to either ruin or redemption. Nica copied the template, marrying the Baron Jules de Koenigswarter for love but then had the good luck to discover jazz in New York in the late 1940s, and to fall for Thelonious Monk to whose welfare she loyally devoted the rest of her life, to the point of risking a long jail term for him. Nica was a consistently forthright, feisty character, wayward perhaps but in a positive, enabling way that has earned her a place in the history of post-war American jazz.

THE BUDDHAS OF BAMIYAN by Llewellyn Morgan (Profile, 244pp; £15.99)

Among the casualties of war are monuments great and small, sometimes damaged by accident, often destroyed deliberately as a political act. The Buddhas of Bamiyan, two gigantic statues carved from a cliff face of reddish stone in a remote mountain valley of the Hindu Kush, were demolished by the Taliban In 2001. The Buddhas had stood for 1400 years, colossal memorials to the piety and wealth of an ancient Buddhist kingdom. The motives for their demolition in the new millennium are still unclear, but historically they had been a focus of fascination to generations of many faiths and races and in modern times were accorded world heritage status. Morgan’s concise story of the Buddhas and of their place in the long traditions of Afghanistan is the latest in a lively series of short studies of world-class architectural and archaeological wonders, written with erudite enthusiasm by expert authors.

WE’LL GET ‘EM IN SEQUINS: Manliness, Yorkshire Cricket and the Century that Changed Everything by Max Davidson (Wisden Sports Writing, 228pp; £18.99)

Any book that lists five reasons why Geoff Boycott might appear to be gay, despite evidence of what supporters might call his – ahem – robust heterosexuality, or that Jimmy Porter, anti-hero of John Osborne’s ‘Look Back in Anger’, if had played cricket, would have been a role model for Fred Trueman, is having a laugh, right? Well, yes – and it’s a good one. Cricket, like anything else, is a signifier of cultural change and Davidson selects seven typical Yorkshire cricketers to chart social changes in class and masculinity over the past century. The metrosexualisation of Yorkshire cricketers from George Hirst, an Edwardian stereotype of manliness, to Darren Gough dancing in sequins on ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ and Michael Vaughan, virile enough to carry off a pink polo shirt and cry on camera, is now complete. There will be letters of protest from the Long Room, no doubt, but Davidson gets it right.

THE WOLF PIT: A Moorland Romance by Will Cohu (Chatto, 246pp; £14.99)

Aficionados of memoirs recognise immediately that any romantic, nostalgic, even idyllic opening chapter will inevitably progress to family disunity, personal disaster and, more than likely, tragic death. It’s trite, maybe, but it is a classic model of literature and can hardly be bettered. The modern prototype is ‘Bad Blood’ by Lorna Sage, and Will Cohu follows the template, though he is less damning of his family than Sage and more disappointed in himself. His focal point is Bramble Carr, his maternal grandparents’ house on the North York Moors and the small, isolated community he knew there as a boy and young man. It is the home, and the extended family, he has irretrievably lost. Though it opens in the mid-1970s, the period detail is of a wholly distant time, a different country: but the family story is in many respects, eternal and still painful. Cohu prays it a bittersweet resquiescat.

THE EVENT OF LITERATURE by Terry Eagleton (Yale, 252pp; £18.99)

By ‘event’ Eagleton means, broadly, the creation, reading and criticism of literature; the transformative practices by which the ideal, truthful state of a piece of literary writing becomes revealed. Defining ‘literature’ in common sense terms, he broadly and empirically characterises it as “a work which is fictional, or which yields significant insight into human experience as opposed to reporting empirical truths or which uses language in a peculiarly heightened, figurative or self-conscious way, or which is not practical in the sense that shopping lists are, or which is highly valued as a piece of writing.” On the “quacking duck” paradigm: if it looks literary, sounds literary and is esteemed as literary, then it is probably a literary work. In this book, which seems to be a summation of his long career as a literary theorist, Eagleton offers a shrewd historical synthesis of the interaction between literature and the common culture.

PARADOX: The Nine Greatest Enigmas in Science by Jim Al-Khalili (Bantam Press, 240pp; £16.99)

Pop physics, like pop psychology and pop culture can give you a warm, fuzzy feeling that you know more than you do. On the level of a game show, science is presented first as puzzling, paradoxical and perplexing until with a ‘Hey Presto!’ the virtuoso professor pulls back the curtain and reveals the mechanics of the scientific sting. This is also how pop science books work, and the wizardry of Jim Al-Khalili is irresistible. Marvel at the mind-bending Zeno’s Paradox! The amazing ambiguity of Schrodinger’s Cat! The preposterous postulation of Perpetual Motion! The extraterrestrial extrapolations of Fermi’s Paradox! The ‘Return to the Future’ twist of the Grandfather Paradox! and other wonders of physics, philosophy and even poetry. “I have had tremendous fun writing this book,” says Professor Jim. Reading it is the best fun you can have beyond a pop science comic book and a home particle accelerator.

CRACKING THE EGYPTIAN CODE: The Revolutionary Life of Jean-Francois Champollion by Andrew Robinson (Thames & Hudson, 272pp; £19.95)

Universally credited as the founder of Egyptology and internationally acclaimed for deciphering the Egyptian hieroglyphs of the Rosetta Stone, Champollion is a national hero of France. But great men, it is said, stand on the shoulders of giants. In this thorough and very welcome biography, the first in English, Robinson ushers forth an English scholar, Thomas Young, from the relative obscurity of his latter-day reputation – even in his own country – as a significant scientific polymath of the early 19^th century, to share credit with the great man. He makes a decent case for Young’s preliminary work, without which Champollion might not have cracked the hieroglyphic code in 1822. But in science and scholarship, winner takes it all. Inevitably it is the revolutionary, dramatic, quarrelsome, charismatic, prodigious genius of Champollion that overshadows Young’s more broad-minded work and temperate character to earn the accolade as the Napoleon of Egyptology.

RUNNING WITH THE KENYANS: Discovering the Secrets of the Fastest People on Earth by Adharanand Finn (Faber, 236pp; £14.99)

Sport is one of the areas where the question ‘nature or nurture?’ may mean the difference between gold, silver, bronze or good/bad loser status. Finn, a sports journalist, who started his athletic career as a schoolboy cross-country runner, decided to pace himself against Kenyan middle- and long-distance runners who, from 1991 to 2009, wiped all competition off the track and road. His story of moving with his family from deepest Devon to wide-open Kenya to train for a marathon race across the African plains is a narrative of a self-imposed challenge rather than a scientific study. While pounding out the miles along dirt tracks, training and working out with everyone from barefoot kids to Olympic aspirants, Finn picks up hints and cues not only about African prowess but about the culture and disciplines of Kenyan family and community life that encourages athletic ability and enables sporting ambition.

CHEEK BY JOWL: A History of Neighbours by Emily Cockayne (Bodley Head, 278pp; £20)

Like your family, neighbours can’t be chosen: your nearest can’t be relied on to be your dearest. But even if they’re nice rather than nasty, there’s no getting away from them. Emily Cockayne’s spry, beady-eyed socio-historical study of nine centuries of neighbourly behaviour from medieval to modern is intelligent, instructive and brightly funny. She defines neighbours as people within five or six houses of each other. Proximity is the problem: her bibliography of primary sources notably leads with Blackstone’s ‘Commentaries on the Laws of England’. Neighbourliness often becomes litigiousness. Density of living space may have provoked extreme sexual and economic stresses, but cramped conditions have also produced a spirit of communality and cooperation in adversity. This is such a timely, welcome book when the concept of being a neighbour is being transformed by social media and mobile phones. Neighbours, traditionally people within hailing distance, can now be virtual as well as real.

LAND’S EDGE: A Coastal Memoir by Tim Winton (Picador120pp, £12.99)

Winton quotes Australian journalist Robert Drewe as saying that almost every Australian rite of passage – physicality, sexuality, middle age breakdown, retirement in old age – occurs on or near the beach. Australians are a race of veranda dwellers, says architect Philip Drew, and the beach is the landscape equivalent of the veranda – a space where life is improvised. Living on the edge is the subject of novelist Tim Winton’s tribute to the shoreline, to a way of life shaped by looking out to sea for whatever may be forthcoming, however inexplicable. This is Winton’s lovely, lyrical memoir about memory and wonder, about a six-year old’s idyllic summer swimming and reading at the beach, about fishing underwater, about beachcombing, about the life of the body as well as of the mind, about being shaped by weather and tide, about the joy and miracle of the grown man not outliving childhood fancies.

CMJ: A Cricketing Life by Christopher Martin-Jenkins (Simon & Schuster, 440pp; £25)

Like Christopher Martin-Jenkins himself, as broadcaster for the BBC and writer for The Times, his memoir is graceful, amusing, as modestly affirmative of triumphs as it is gallantly tolerant of tragedies. CMJ is, in short, decently collegiate and Corinthian towards a game which has changed radically since he first played it as a schoolboy and parlayed it to his friends. He counts himself lucky to have made a living out of childhood fantasies. As President of the MCC, an office he left in 2011, CMJ may be expected to be discreet, even-handed indeed, about the crises and characters of English cricket and so – sportsmanlike – he is for most of the book. He allows himself, nevertheless, some leeway to tell entertaining stories about his colleagues. As a charmed life, told charmingly, the story of CMJ’s lifetime love for his family, colleagues, friends and the game will give pleasure to many fans.

ENEMIES: A History of the FBI by Tim Weiner (Allen Lane, £25; 542pp)

As with all activities of secretive intelligence agencies, there is a fine line between the defence of the realm and the erosion of civil liberties. Weiner picks this up as a major theme in his story of the FBI, and very often the issue results in a standoff between the FBI and the Supreme Court. As a short, savvy, bare-bones overview of a government agency that deeply distrusted and sought to control all American citizens and assert authority over government itself, it is profoundly disturbing. Even Eleanor Roosevelt regarded an FBI investigation that struck close to home “to smack too much of the Gestapo methods.” Most of this attitude was down to the obsessive, perversely patriotic personality of J. Edgar Hoover who directed the radical philosophy and the abusive methods of the FBI with a steel-trap mind and iron hand for half a century. Weiner tells a dark tale with acerbic authority.

72 HOURS by Frank Pope (Orion, £18.99; 262pp)

On 5 August 2005, thirty miles off the coast of Kamchatka, Russian Navy submersible AS-28 became entangled in a web of cables 600 feet underwater and stuck fast. Seven crew members waited for rescue, which quickly involved a call by the Russians for specialist international assistance. The Royal Navy’s Submarine Rescue Service responded promptly. Its leader, Commander Ian Riches, estimated that it would be only three days – 72 hours – before the crew’s oxygen ran out. Pope, the Ocean Correspondent of The Times and an expert marine archaeologist, tells a suspenseful true-life tale in a staccato, novelistic style. The stifling conditions in the submersible are evoked with empathetic realism, and the exemplary efforts of the rescue team are presented with dramatic flair. Political tensions add a note of complexity to the nuts and bolts of the mission which – no spoiler here – ended successfully with medals all round.

THE REGIONS OF SARA COLERIDGE’S THOUGHT: Selected Literary Criticism by Peter Swaab (Palgrave Macmillan, £55; 238pp)

This concise collection of Sara Coleridge’s prolific output of writings is welcome on so many levels of delight that it is difficult to understand how she has fallen into comparative neglect as a Victorian intellectual literary critic, editor, letter writer, translator and poet. As the daughter of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, she became the editor and, in all but name, the executor of his literary estate. Her critical work was erudite and exemplary, in regard to her father and other poets; Tennyson in particular. Elizabeth Barrett Browning rated her as more learned than any other female writer of the day, though Mrs Browning would have been taken aback by the Sara’s strict criticism of her poetry which she judged with neither fear of popular celebrity nor favour towards her own sex. Sara’s perception of poetry and opinion of people is shrewd, sharp, ruthlessly reasoned, expressed with vigour and strikingly modern in attitude.

BLAKE’S LONDON: The Topographic Sublime by Iain Sinclair (The Swedenborg Society, £5.95; 60pp)

Nobody perceives the city like Sinclair: the gothic, the grotesque, the Grand Guignol, all are grist to the mill of his mind as the leading ‘psychogeographer’ of London and its purlieus. But he has had predecessors, notably poets, and most famously the visionary William Blake of Lambeth. This elegant little book, demurely but deceptively jacketed in grey, is the text of a lecture given in 2007 to the Swedenborg Society by Sinclair in which he adds his own discursive voice to a poetic charivari, a discordant serenade to London. As a response to Blake, it is performed by the peasant poet John Clare following almost literally in his footsteps, by a passing shadow of the rambunctious Rimbaud. On Primrose Hill, also communing with Blake, is the Beat (and beatific) poet Allen Ginsberg sharing notebooks with the antic poet Harry Fainlight. The prismatic vision offered here of London through Blake’s inspiration is dazzling,

OPIUM: Reality’s Dark Dream by Thomas Dormandy (Yale, £25; 366pp)

The poetry and the politics of opium, from smoke dreams to intravenous highs, are derivatives of a drug that has enchanted and enslaved humanity from its first fermentation in the Stone Age to the final razing of poppy fields in Afghanistan in an effort to control a traffic in what has been exalted as ‘God’s own medicine’ and vilified as a curse on society. Dormandy, a chemical pathologist and a vigorously polymathic writer, chases the dragon as it rampages, for good and ill, through history, religion, culture and medicine. The morphing forms of the juice of the white poppy, from opium to laudanum, to the active alkaloid morphine which was refined in the mid-20^th century to the “more ‘heroic’ derivative heroin, are acutely analysed and set in the long perspective of the powerful organisations that have profited from a trade that brings easeful palliative comfort to many but the nightmare of addiction to millions.

DECEPTION: Spies, Lies and How Russia Dupes the West by Edward Lucas (Bloomsbury, £20; £374pp)

Lucas, an ‘Economist’ editor, alleges that the West has become dangerously complacent about the activities of Russian spies who pose a threat that officialdom is reluctant to discuss and that the public is unwilling to admit. By playing up Anna Chapman, a post-Soviet agent arrested in the US in 2010, as a sexy Bond-style villainess, he says, we played down the seriousness of her activities as one of many long-term subversives planted by the Russians in ordinary middle-class Western life. To support his case, Lucas also interviews Herman Simm, “Russia’s top spy in NATO”, now serving a prison sentence in Estonia, who talks frankly about his career in espionage. Though the tone too often sounds like an updated report from the Cold War period, Lucas’s message is urgent and heartfelt. He insists that the Russian bear, for all its polished new pelt, has not changed its “tyrannical” nature or “murderous” behaviour.