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At the dark heart of this dark book is a startling fact: Joseph Conrad was employed to steam up the Congo river by the same company, Union Minière du Haut Katanga, that later shipped uranium from the Congo to the US, where it was used to make the bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Patrick Marnham develops that historical oddity into a brilliant travelogue, blended with an angry history of America’s atomic bomb and a meditation on what the creation of nuclear weapons means for the human psyche. It is his own journey into a Heart of Darkness. He follows not a river, however, but the flow of uranium.

Anyone with a passing interest in old British buildings must get angry at the horrors inflicted on our town centres over the last half-century or so. Gavin Stamp is wonderfully, amusingly, movingly angry. And he has been ever since the early 1960s when, as a boy at Dulwich College, he saw workmen hack off the stiff-leaf column capitals in the school cloisters. He reserves particular rage for that ‘cynical, philistine Whig’ Harold Macmillan for murdering the Euston Arch. Not that Stamp’s a ranting fogey, reserving his anger only for the demolition of Victorian buildings.

Ten years ago, a determined historian transformed our picture of John F. Kennedy. Robert Dallek had finally got his hands on the president’s medical records and discovered just how big a part JFK’s constant health problems played in his life. Instead of a young, fit, athletic leader, Dallek revealed a man racked with pain, suffering from Addison’s disease and excruciating spinal damage and swallowing a daily pharmacy of drugs and potions. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, for example, when his finger hovered over the nuclear button, he was pumped full of steroids and antibiotics, amphetamines and testosterone, ritalin and sleeping pills. He had been given the last rites on three occasions before he was 35.

Numbers, as every mathematician knows, do odd things. But they’re never odder than in the human context. Ever since we crept out of the swamps, we’ve been making numbers lucky, fearsome, ominous and even sacred. Across the cultures, we’re nuts about numbers, with little thought for logic. Take 23, for example. In 1960, William Burroughs met a sea captain who, after exactly 23 years at sea, was lost with all hands. The same day, Flight 23 was reported lost in Florida. After that, Burroughs became obsessed by the portentousness of 23, and others followed. At last, 23 was exposed; it’s the psalm of choice at funerals; in ancient Chinese tradition, it meant ‘breaking apart’. There were plenty of other ominous 23s.

I’ll own up at once. Tim Richardson and Andrew Lawson, the author and photographer of The New English Garden (Frances Lincoln, £40, Spectator Bookshop, £30), are friends of mine — no very unusual circumstance in the small world of garden writing. Moreover, I wrote this book’s forerunner, The English Garden, also in collaboration with Andrew Lawson. However, my reputation would falter if I sold you an expensive pup so, if I tell you that The New English Garden is one of the more important and interesting gardening books published this year, you may believe me. The book looks at 25 innovative gardens or public spaces that have either been made, or re-made, since 2000.

We constantly need to be reminded that the consequence of war is death. In the case of the first world war it led to death and destruction on an inconceivably vast scale. To convey the enormity of what the industrialised slaughter that supposedly civilised governments unleashed between 1914 and 1918, film-makers like to pan the camera over a vast sea of white crosses. But if they do, that cemetery will probably be French or American. It will certainly not be British. The only cross in a cemetery maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission will be a free-standing one with a bronze sword attached, a rather ‘Onwards Christian Soldiers’ symbol designed by Reginald Blomfield.