Non-Fiction

Stealing The Scream
By Edward Dolnick

When in 1994 a couple of slapstick thieves stole Edvard Munch's The Scream from Norway's Munch Museum, falling off a ladder in the process before bundling it into a car, they were part of a long tradition. The most famous instance of art theft was when an Italian painter-decorator nicked the Mona Lisa in 1911, but Vermeers, Rembrandts, Turners and, just last week, Picassos go missing with seeming regularity. According to Edward Dolnick - whose book deals largely with the latest theft of The Scream in 2004 - it is not art-loving Mr Bigs wanting a masterpiece for their walls who are behind it, but boring old drug barons and Mafiosi using the pictures as collateral. Dolnick's source is Charley Hill, former head of Scotland Yard's Art Squad, whose knowledge the author weaves into a fascinating but dispiriting tale: for example, the £3m Henry Moore statue stolen in 2005 was not purloined for its subtle exploration of form and mass but to be melted down for its bronze. That's art appreciation.

Icon, £12.99

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The Trouble with Physics
By Lee Smolin

So what is the trouble with physics? According to Lee Smolin, a distinguished practitioner at the Institute of Theoretical Physics near Toronto, it's the physicists. They have always been too ready to claim they know it all. Look at Lord Kelvin announcing in 1900 that physics was done and dusted... and then along came quantum theory and Einstein. The same hubristic attitude is abroad now with string theorists trumpeting their baby - the idea that particles are not points or waves but one-dimensional strings - as the 'grand unified theory'. Smolin sets out to show that not only is string theory not all it's cracked up to be but that in sticking to it so fervently physicists have stopped looking for theories that might better explain life, the universe and everything. For the layman, this is challenging stuff, but because Smolin's attack on scientific standards is a passionate one it carries the reader along.

Allen Lane, £25

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Buda's Wagon
By Mike Davis

Car bombs, like cars themselves, are anonymous, manoeuverable and efficient. What turned a means of transport into something deadly, however, was the discovery in 1969 of just what mixing ammonium nitrate fertiliser and fuel oil could do. It wasn't the American student radicals who came up with this cocktail who put it to use - that was left to the IRA, Falangists, Tamil Tigers, Afghan mujahideen and, of course, Iraqi dissidents. Zionists in 1947 may have been the first to park and blow - they used conventional explosives - but since then the car bomb has become the terrorists' weapon of choice. Mike Davis is not the most reliable of narrators, though: his history of the car bomb is a skewed one. He has trouble distinguishing victim from perpetrator, with the drivers and primers of car bombs getting off rather more lightly than US 'imperialists'. If Davis's moral relativism is a damp squib his facts are nevertheless percussive.

Verso, £12.99

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Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000-2005
By J.M. Coetzee

J.M. Coetzee is not an easy writer. He may have won the Booker Prize twice but his fiction has always been rather easier to admire than to like. As an haut litterateur, he is not a man to make concessions to his readers in either his fiction or non-fiction and does not pretend to write easily comprehensible books. Truth, billed as a novel, read like straight autobiography; Elizabeth Costello contained long moral asides about animal rights. This latest volume is a collection of his literary essays from 2000 to 2005; Coetzee at his day job - a professor of literature - that is. His great love is for mittel-Europeans - there are pieces on Joseph Roth, Sandor Marai, Robert Musil and W.G. Sebald among others; but there are also essays on the American greats (Faulkner, Bellow, Miller and Philip Roth). If you keep your wits about you, then Coetzee is a demanding but enlightening guide.

Harvill Secker, £17.99

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