Non-Fiction
The Noble Revolt
By John Adamson
The English Civil War has never really stopped. Charles I and Cromwell may be long gone, but historians quickly picked up their standards where they fell and have been battling it out ever since. The war has been blamed on religion, on Puritanism and on accident, among other causes. But according to John Adamson's startlingly revisionist new history, it was the unexpected result of the activities of a group of nobles who sought initially only to rein in the King's growing autocracy and safeguard old English freedoms. Adamson is powerfully persuasive, and his central characters are the Earls of Warwick and Bedford and the junta of aristocrats they gathered around them. What these nobles did was to exploit the disaffection of the Scots and, in effect, foment rebellion - and they started in 1640, fully two years before Charles fled London and hostilities proper started. Adamson backs up his brave conceit with a daunting range of references and a fluent prose style. This is history at its biggest and boldest.
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25
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Impotence: A Cultural History
By Angus McLaren
It's remarkable what a potent affliction impotence is. As Angus McLaren shows in his tour d'horizon of the droop, men have been fretting about their inability to get it up for 2,500 years. Ovid and Catullus bemoaned the independent-mindedness of their nether regions and the worrying hasn't stopped since - at least until the arrival of Viagra. McLaren takes the reader through the range of 'cures' that were tried in pre-pharmaceutical times: from the palatable - chickpeas and asparagus - to the unpalatable - eunuch's urine and electrodes - to the plain barking - pissing through a church keyhole. Such is man's determination to regain his manhood that no humiliation is too much to endure. And the main reason for the problem in the first place? It's women who take the blame, of course; they are either too reluctant or too eager. The male member may display a mind of its own, but men often have no brains at all.
Chicago UP, £15.25
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Rites of Peace
By Adam Zamoyski
For one of Europe's great set-piece scenes, the Congress of Vienna has been strangely neglected. Instead, Napoleon - the man whose trouble-making the gathering was formed to put right - has soaked up all the attention. Adam Zamoyski's latest book shows what historians have been missing while blinded by the glare of 'le petit caporal'. For the nine months from late 1814 that the convocation lasted, diplomacy by day to shape the future of war-torn Europe was offset by frenzied partying by night. The most glittering women on the Continent were drawn to this one-off gathering of its most illustrious men. Zamoyski describes both the diurnal and nocturnal congresses with clarity and narrative verve. Metternich, Tsar Alexander, Wellington and Talleyrand take their place alongside Princess Bagration ('the naked angel') and the indefatigable Duchess of Sagan. The Congress may not have fulfilled every hope for European peace, but it helped hold the fort for another 100 years.
HarperCollins, £25
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The Last Food of England
By Marwood Yeatman
Not so very many years ago England's indigenous food was hard to find, but farmers' markets, gastropubs, the restaurant boom and Prince Charles have meant that few people can be in much doubt as to the variety and toothsomeness of this country's edibles. Which makes Marwood Yeatman's book - handsome though it is - something of an oddity: in describing England's delicacies as some form of secret, it is, ahem, catering for a time that has long passed. Perhaps he's just a slow worker. The Last Food of England is a commonplace book of food, stuffed with facts (this country contains more breeds of livestock, vegetable types and fruit cultivars than any other, apparently), the occasional recipe, food tourism and gastro reminiscences. His lipsmacking accounts of green-top milk, roast oxen and the like are, however, seasoned with a misplaced Colonel Blimpish nostalgia. Yeatman is a man who smokes his own ham and brews his own beer: perhaps someone should tell him that such delicacies can now be found in supermarkets.
Ebury Press, £25
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Fiction
The Dig
By John Preston
John Preston's latest novel tells the story of the discovery of the Anglo-Saxon Sutton Hoo treasure on the eve of the Second World War. As one clash of civilisations is about to start, so the remains of an older, unknown one are unearthed. The story is told through the voices of the key players - the horny-handy son of the soil who recognises what the burial mound might contain; the neurasthenic gentry lady who owns the land and for whom the excavations are an act of homage to her dead husband; the newly-wed Cambridge archaeologist who is the first to hold the ancient gold in her hand. The dig stirs deep feelings in all of them. Since the outcome of the dig - the discovery of the hoard - is already known, it is a considerable feat of skill to keep the reader hooked, but Preston does so by eschewing his tale's Indiana Jones potential and treating his characters with restraint and delicacy. It's a pitch-perfect piece.
Viking, £16.99
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In the Dark
By Deborah Moggach
It's been seven years now since Tulip Fever lifted Deborah Moggach out of the amorphous body of 'lady novelists' but she has not really followed through on that success - her subsequent novels have been accomplished rather than sparkling. In the Dark is unlikely to win her a new audience, either. As the war in Flanders consumes able-bodied men, ennui consumes Eithne Clay, boarding-house owner and mother of an onanistically dextrous son, Ralph. Her house guests are faded souls, too: a blind Communist, an impoverished family, a plainer-than-plain housemaid. Into this tired world steps the local butcher, smoothing his way into Eithne's heart and bed with choice cuts, stirring resentment in both son and Communist. These last two find sexual release of their own. It's a neatly-realised tale with well-observed detail, but for all the romping it struggles to shake itself free from its dowdy setting.
Chatto & Windus, £12.99
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The Art of Lee Miller
Lee Miller was that most unforgivable of things: gorgeous and unfeasibly talented. But it's absolutely right to salute a woman who progressed from model and muse to being one of the most revered photographers of the 20th century. To coincide with both the centenary of her birth and their major retrospective of her work in September, the V&A has published The Art of Lee Miller. The major photographs are here of course, but also rare drawings, Miller's own writings and her unflinching - and sometimes surreal - war photography and reportage. The book has an advantage from the start: it can't help but be beautiful and intriguing when that's exactly what the subject was.
V&A, £35
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Paperbacks
The Architecture of Happiness
Alain de Botton here turns his thoughts to our relationships with buildings and comes up with even more banalities and fewer insights than usual. Buildings matter, he decides, and so do sofas and soft furnishings and he has lots of quotes to back him up. It's thin stuff.
Penguin, £9.99
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The Yellow House
The nine weeks that Van Gogh and Gauguin spent living and working together in late 1888 could only, in hindsight, have ended badly. Martin Gayford's thorough and sensible account describes the hothouse atmosphere that produced numerous great pictures and one severed ear.
Penguin, £8.99
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Bad Faith
Louis Darquier, Vichy France's Commissioner for Jewish Affairs, was a squalid character even by the standards of those unsavoury times. Carmen Callil was drawn to Darquier's story by the suicide of his daughter, her analyst, and has produced a powerful account of a loathsome man.
Vintage, £9.99
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The Perfect Man
Naeem Murr's novel traces the growing pains of a young Indian boy transplanted to post-war America. The back-of-beyond town he ends up in has its oddballs, drunks and a secret, but it is here that he discovers friendship and love. Murr is equally deft with innocence and menace.
Vintage, £7.99
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Books is edited by Edwin Reardon
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