Non-Fiction

The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh
By Linda Colley

Elizabeth Marsh, the subject of Linda Colley's latest book, raised her head above the parapet of history only once - in 1756, when she was captured by Barbary pirates and taken to the Sultan of Morocco, who considered adding her to his harem before deciding to use her as a diplomatic bargaining chip instead. Colley here looks at the (larger) part of Marsh's story that has remained out of sight. Elizabeth Marsh's trajectory would seem adventurous enough today - Jamaica, England, Menorca, Morocco, Bengal - and she added a failed marriage and a long love affair into the bargain. Through this woman Professor Colley shows the extraordinary mobility and vibrancy of 18th-century existence, social as well as mercantile, and how women too could leave lives considerably less constricted than we like to imagine. This book is an impressive feat - scholarly, fluent, nicely judged - and a reminder that lives that didn't shape great events can be every bit as interesting as those that did.

HarperCollins, £25

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Sex.Com
By Kieren McCarthy

A little foresight is a wonderful thing. In the early 1990s when, antediluvian as it now seems, there was life outside the internet, Gary Kremen, an American software salesman, registered a website called sex.com. His aim was not to offer web sex but rather sex education. A year or so later, as the cyberspace revolution gathered pace, Kremen logged on to find that his website had been stolen by a con-man and pornographer called Stephen Cohen, who was busy making a fortune from his appropriated cash cow. Kieren McCarthy's book is the story of sex.com and Kremen's 12-year legal battle to regain his property (which he eventually did, before selling it on for $12m, making sex.com the most expensive website ever). McCarthy doesn't always make the most of his entertaining cast of geeks and porn barons, but his very modern cautionary tale is one that really tells itself.

Quercus, £12.99

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Einstein: His Life and Universe
By Walter Isaacson

Einstein's enduring fame rests, one suspects, less on his achievements in physics (which remain fearsomely difficult for the layman to understand) but on his image as the complete eccentric scientist: would he be so famous without that hair? Perhaps it also owes something to the feeling that Einstein thought less like a scientist and more like an artist, imagining his way to insight and understanding. There has been no shortage of biographies of the man, and we know about his prickliness and his infidelities as well as his courage in defying German militarists during the First World War and his prescience in later encouraging the Allies to arm against his country of birth. Though Walter Isaacson's biography may not contain any startling new information, it offers a fine overview of Einstein and his theories. He is even lucid enough to make relativity almost comprehensible: if you change your speed - step on a train, for instance - then the speed of light doesn't change but time itself does, apparently.

Simon & Schuster, £25

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The Act You've Known For All These Years
By Clinton Heylin

A whole book on a single album might seem a bit much, and it is. Clinton Heylin thinks the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is wildly overrated and sets out to show why, at length. There's much of interest here, especially the idea that the record was a response to the growing trend of the concept album and that the Fab Four felt threatened by the increasing hipness of others - Pink Floyd and Bob Dylan among them: this was their attempt to join the avant garde. Less interesting are Heylin's own protestations. To paraphrase the words of the song, it was 40 years ago today that the album first appeared, and for better or worse it has been judged a classic. Heylin may not like it, but that doesn't make it a lesser piece of work.

Canongate, £16.99

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