Non-Fiction

Seize the Hour: When Nixon Met Mao
By Margaret MacMillan

It was President Nixon, with the boldest diplomatic stroke in memory, who decided to engineer an end to the suspicion, hostility and ignorance that characterised Sino-American thinking. His visit to China to meet Mao in 1972 was the product of two years behind-the-scenes work, and was to lay the basis for a working relationship that exists - albeit crankily - to this day. Margaret MacMillan tells the story, and outlines the players, with admirable lucidity, turning a political rapprochement into high drama.

John Murray, £25

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Europe's Physician: The Various Life of Sir Theodore de Mayerne
By Hugh Trevor-Roper

Hugh Trevor-Roper is proving posthumously prolific. A collection of his waspish letters to Bernard Berenson was published earlier this year, and now comes a more serious work, a manuscript he had been tinkering with for some 30 years. Theodore de Mayerne was one of those distinctively pan-European figures with which the 17th-century abounded: a physician, a spy, a diplomat and a networker who slipped between the courts of Henry IV of France and James I (and later Charles I) of England. Small wonder he attracted the attention of Trevor-Roper, a man intrigued by intellectual shifts and moral accommodations. This is a fine piece of history writing that has the stamp of a fully fledged work, not a work in progress.

Yale, £25

Beyond Words
By John Humphrys

The broadcaster John Humphrys became very exercised about the misuse of the language and had a good old rant in Lost for Words. He's still hot under the collar, and this new book is another plea for linguistic precision and an examination of the way different groups use words. He can be very funny: he points out, for example, that HM Customs and Revenue boasts of "working with the largest customer base of any UK organisation" - collecting our taxes, in other words - and that supermarkets don't talk about shopping but rather the "experience" of Tesco, Waitrose et al. Fulminations, however - even in a noble cause - are like all bees-in-bonnets, they pall before too long.

Hodder & Stoughton, £9.99

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Marking the Hours: English People and their Prayers
By Eamon Duffy

This is a seemingly dry topic, the Books of Hours - or personal prayer books - which generations of medieval men and women used to regulate their days. Eamon Duffy, however, as he proved with The Voices of Morebath, is the most gifted of current historians at teasing out the telling details of private lives from unlikely sources. He does just that here, examining the marginalia and jottings in a variety of private religious books for hints as to the concerns and habits of their owners. Duffy makes them tell a poignant tale.

Yale, £19.99