Non-Fiction

Being Shelley
By Anne Wroe

We can't, it seems, get enough of the Romantic poets. Last year it was the turn of Wordsworth and Coleridge to be slid, once again, under the critical microscope (courtesy of Adam Sisman). This year, it's Shelley's turn (there's a complementary study, Death and the Maidens by Janet Todd, out now too). Anne Wroe has set out not to examine Shelley from the outside but to uncover what it was like to be the poet. She worked hard at deciphering his notebooks, and being Shelley, she thinks, has nothing to do with chronology but rather with the elements - he is variously earth, air, fire and water in his life, loves, verse and death. So it is marriage to 16-year-old Harriet Westbrook that makes him earthbound, for example, and it is fire - a beachside funeral pyre in Italy - that famously marks his death. This is a bold, innovative, indeed poetic approach, not just to Shelley but to biography itself, and it works.

Jonathan Cape, £25

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Undressing Emmanuelle
By Sylvia Kristel

The two icons of 1970s eroticism were Linda Lovelace and Sylvia Kristel, and being the focus of the world's onanists brought neither of them much joy. Indeed Kristel, according to this engaging if slightly wacky memoir, was never a porn star at all. She was the product of an abusive childhood and a ferocious religious education who wanted to be an actress but, on winning Miss TV Europe in 1973, found herself cast as Emmanuelle instead. And she didn't escape for years. She starred in three Emmanuelle films, a lingeringly underdressed version of Lady Chatterley's Lover and as Mata Hari - during which her acting skills were not to the fore. In this account her film career is less interesting than the personal disintegration that followed - drink, drugs, cancer, Ian McShane and Warren Beatty. Kristel is as unsparing of her younger self as she is of the exploitative world in which she found herself. She's a painter now - and not of nudes.

Fourth Estate, £14.99

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Death in Ancient Rome
By Catherine Edwards

For the Romans it was death as much as life that was the measure of a man: a good life could be unmade by a bad death and a noble end could make amends for what went before. A stage-managed death was important - look at Cato, who disemboweled himself after defeat by Julius Caesar, or Lucretia, raped by a son of the king of Rome, who stabbed herself to death out of shame and whose body, when shown to the people, inspired them to rise up and establish the republic. Catherine Edwards has sifted the works of Cicero, Virgil, Tacitus and more to show, fascinatingly, just how significant quitting the world was both for those leaving and as an example to those left behind. She looks too at less choreographed ends: soldiers killed in battle, gladiators who perished in the amphitheatre - they would also have to account for their means of going, to their ancestors in the afterlife.

Yale, £25

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The Line Upon a Wind
By Noel Mostert

Two years ago saw the bicentenary of the Battle of Trafalgar, an anniversary that seemingly launched a thousand books on the ships, commanders, men and engagements of the war against Napoleon. It is, therefore, either brave or foolhardy of Noel Mostert to try his hand on such crowded waters. His advantage, though, is that he's had access to the Garrison Library at Gibraltar and this has enabled him to come up with the broadest study yet of the maritime struggle of the years 1793-1815. He takes in not just the conflict in Continental waters but also in American ones - and the Royal Navy's campaign against Barbary pirates too. Individual battles may get more attention elsewhere but Mostert's book is surely the most encyclopedic on the subject. Its greatest merit is to show that Trafalgar, the Nile et al were not isolated face-offs but part of a rolling war whose outcome decided the war on land.

Jonathan Cape, £25

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