Non-Fiction

A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton By Carl Bernstein

Other people's marriages are a mystery, but the Clintons' more than most. Did Hillary stick with her errant husband during his endless 'bimbo eruptions' out of love or ambition? Is their coupledom a pact to ensure her elevation to the highest office in the land? What is the state of their marriage now? These - among others - are some of the questions that the Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein seeks to answer in this study of America's would-be leader. He's only partially successful but he has much diverting information to impart along the way: about Hillary's draconian Republican father, about her academic limitations (she failed her bar exam), about the shambolic nature of the White House under Bill, and about the joint presidency theirs clearly was. One thing Bernstein is in no doubt of: without her husband's megawatt charm Hillary, who is so lacking in that commodity, has absolutely no chance of winning the presidency.

Hutchinson, £25

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The Diana Chronicles
By Tina Brown

Blonde, gamine and crisply coutured, Tina Brown has been likened to her subject, Princess Diana, by more than one commentator - and it doesn't play well. What are the similarities, she asks, between her and the "airhead daughter of an earl"? This distaste didn't stop her from accepting £1m to write this biography, though. Brown has done her bit to earn her corn, interviewing some 250 of Diana's 'closest friends' (ie hacks and others) and ploughing through the voluminous literature. And she's rehashed plenty of gossip - Diana's first affair was with Barry Mannakee, her protection officer; Charles once diverted the royal train for a pre-marriage tryst and so on. More interesting is her idea that Diana shaped her life to fill tabloid headlines because tabloids were the only things she read. In the end though, this is all a bit of new froth on top of the dried deposit of the old. It is diverting enough, but does anyone care any more?

Century, £18.99

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Sylvia, Queen of the Headhunters
By Philip Eade

Sylvia Brooke should have been an extra Mitford sister, such was the eccentricity and scandal of her life. Instead, she had to make do with being the Ranee of Sarawak. She was the wife of the Rajah, Sir Vyner Brooke, who ruled over a population of 500,000 and an area of 40,000 square miles before he sold his fiefdom to Britain in 1946 for £1m. Sylvia's avowed aim was to "live flamingly and electrify the world". She did, too - electrifying the gossip columnists, at least - with a series of relationships with younger men, a love of parties and low-life and three daughters who shared her taste for unsuitable men and her distaste for decorum. Philip Eade's fascinating biography recounts a hedonistic life lived in Sarawak, Europe and the Caribbean, and it is a measure of his skill as much as the character of his subject that her remorseless White Mischief-style high-jinks don't pall. It's all highly entertaining.

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20

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West End Chronicles
By Ed Glinert

Having dealt with the history of London's East End, Ed Glinert has moved across town for this new volume. Until 300 years ago there was no West End, just fields and villages, but with the Great Fire of London and the Georgians in particular a whole new London was born. Glinert is not a man for in-depth social history, but for the oddities that bring history alive he's your man. Marble Arch, for example, stands where the gallows of Tyburn once were, and buses circle where 24 miscreants were hanged simultaneously; Soho's reputation as the home of sex in the capital was founded early, drawing an aficionado like Casanova in 1764; money and Mayfair have always gone together, with a patrician such as Lord Howard de Walden having the original John Lewis, a merchant, thrown in jail for having the temerity to expand his premises. Glinert's West End doesn't always glitter but it is always colourful.

Allen Lane, £25

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