Non-Fiction

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
By Nassim Nicholas Taleb

There's been a flurry of grand new theories of late. We've had 'the Tipping Point', 'the Long Tail' and now 'the Black Swan' comes paddling along. At the heart of this big idea is the disjunction between the world as we are primed to live it and the world as it really is. Humans, says Nassim Nicholas Taleb, think that existence is predictable, structured and safe; the truth is the opposite - as when black swans were discovered in Australia, it having been assumed until then that all swans were white. So when an improbable event with huge consequences happens - ie a Black Swan - we try to rationalise it away: 9/11, for example, or Google or a man such as Bill Gates. They only become inevitable after the event. As technology advances and the pace of change increases, Black Swans will happen more often and extremes will become the norm. The result, says Taleb, is that history is increasingly useless as a guide to the future. It's a clever conceit, though what use it is is harder to judge. Perhaps a Black Swan will tell us.

Allen Lane, £20

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Austerity Britain, 1945-1951
By David Kynaston

Thanks to historians such as Dominic Sandbrook and Peter Hennessy, the grim years that followed the Second World War are in the middle of a renaissance. David Kynaston is the latest to show just how profoundly they still affect us today. His book is a sociological take on the period that questions the whole idea of 'community', which has long seemed the defining characteristic of the time. His collection of voices shows that the ending of the war allowed individualism to flourish again. The testimony comes from the likes of a retired schoolteacher, a Pooterish civil servant and a put-upon Chingford housewife as well as a young Glenda Jackson, a just-arrived-in-the-country Doris Lessing and the tyro John Arlott. The outcome is not so much historical coherence as a nuanced portrait of the elastic ties between families and the variety of outlooks on an unpredictable new world.

Bloomsbury, £20

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The Lost World of James Smithson
By Heather Ewing

The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, America's most venerable repository of learning, owes its existence to a quirk of fate. Its founder, James Smithson (1765-1829), was not American, nor had he ever visited the country. Rather, he was the bastard son of the Duke of Northumberland, who gave his son not a penny. As a consequence Smithson grew up with a ferocious will to succeed. The money he inherited from his feisty mother allowed him to travel and to practise science and he left his own fortune to a nephew with the stipulation that, should the nephew die childless, the money should be used to found an 'establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge'. And so it happened. Smithson's personal papers were destroyed in a fire at the Institution in 1865, which makes Heather Ewing's fascinating reconstruction of his life all the more impressive. She keeps the 'must have' quotient low and the detail high. Smithson, she makes clear, was an accidental philanthropist.

Bloomsbury, £20

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The Khyber Pass
By Paddy Docherty

The Khyber Pass is stamped on the British consciousness because our imperial adventurers squeezed through its narrow confines in the 19th century. The attempts of Victoria's armies to subdue the Afghan tribesmen were, however, simply one campaign in a line that stretched back to the times before Alexander the Great. The Pass, a 30-mile slice in the mountains that's only 20 yards wide in places, is the conduit that links India and Central Asia. The Persian army of King Cyrus and the hordes of Genghis Khan spewed out of it to conquer the fertile land to the south. But trade and culture issued forth too, while Buddhism travelled north through it, as well as east, to reach out of India, though it failed to prosper in the Hindu Kush. It is a rich subject which Paddy Docherty tells well, manfully pushing on through the lack of sources for the early medieval period to explain the full significance of this legendary crack in the rocks.

Faber, £17.99

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