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Picture this scene: in the delivery room of a Botswana hospital, a woman howls with the pain of childbirth and her midwife becomes increasingly bothered that she is disturbing the other patients. Whatever tension there is in this exchange — a woman suffering labour without drugs, an underpaid, overstretched health worker having a bad day — it is transformed by the fact that the nurse is African, the mother-to-be British. ‘White women,’ the midwife huffs in annoyance and, in the process, identifies the dilemma at the heart of this book. There is a strong tradition of European women writing about their experiences in Africa. What attracts them? The call of the primordial, the seductive tugging of some half-perceived genetic memory?

Edward Carson: even today, almost 70 years after his death, the name of the barrister and Unionist leader has the power to inspire hatred or adulation. A short time ago Ian Paisley was photographed at the election count in Belfast City Hall touching a bust of Carson as though it was a sacred relic. To his detractors, Carson stands in the same relation to the rancorous, sectarian creed of Paisleyism as Hitler does to neo-Nazism. Carson has not lacked biographers, notwithstanding the dust-jacket’s puff for this as the first modern biography. The three-volume official biography, started by Edward Marjoribanks, half-brother of the late Lord Hailsham, and completed by Ian Colvin, was published a decade or so after The Waste Land; it was hardly modernist but it was certainly modern.

To a British reader who knows the subject, 1776 may seem pretty thin. To one who doesn’t, it may be confusing. It is an account of the military history of a single year of the American revolution, so the ambitions of the author are oddly limited. David McCullough doesn’t explain why the revolution began. He doesn’t explain why the Americans won. He doesn’t even delve much into the origins of the Declaration of Independence, which was proclaimed in 1776, or reveal much about the men who signed it. But McCullough nevertheless demonstrates, once again, why he is America’s best-selling historian. For his book does lend colour and interest to events that have sadly come to seem dry and dusty to most Americans.

Consider this. Does lightning ever strike twice in the same place? Along the magnolia corridors of the most expensive prison ever built in England, in the sombre half-light of a locked-fast double cell, it struck fatally (if metaphorically) once and almost fatally another two times before an oblivious prison service woke up to what was occurring right under their noses — a bizarre sequence of events which they eventually exposed as the premeditated machinations of a serial killer. ‘The Strange Case of Glenn Wright’ (as David Wilson himself entitles this meandering tale of dastardly homicidal intent) constitutes the most sensational section of this trenchant polemic.

It is surely rare to find a book that describes a marriage with such breathtaking intimacy as Diana Melly does in her autobiography, Take a Girl Like Me. Not only are both the leading players very much alive, most of the varied cast are still vigorously kicking. Mrs Melly writes the story of her grippingly unconventional life as the wife of that monstre sucré George with an astonishing yet matter-of-fact frankness. In almost any more humdrum liaison, the facts she recounts would matter like mad, and frankly might deter, even prohibit, any hint of matrimonial harmony.

Like Philip Mansel I am a passionate believer in the importance of trivia in history, or rather what most academic historians would regard as such. Years ago, at the close of the Sixties, I was the first chair of the newly formed Costume Society, in the main because I could keep the warring women gathered around the table from tearing each other’s hair out. That society has just celebrated its 40th anniversary and both it and the course on the subject at the Courtauld Institute signal that the topic at last has gained status. It is the one which first drew me to history when I was a child and thence to the study of Elizabeth I, history’s greatest monument to power dressing.

To anyone who enjoyed Fernand Braudel’s masterly work on the Mediterranean or Neal Ascher- son’s wonderful Black Sea, the idea of a book on the Baltic is an appealing one.

In 1991, A.S. Byatt wrote an introduction to a reissue of her first novel, The Shadow of the Sun (1964), in which she recalls that she had: the eternal first novelist’s problem ... I didn’t want to write a ‘me-novel’ [but] I didn’t know anything — about life, at least. Highly autobiographical first novels are still out of fashion and even budding writers are expected to cast their eye away from themselves. And yet in our culture of instant gratification and celebrity, a writer’s reputation can depend almost exclusively on the critical reception of a first novel. The eternal problem today, it seems, is twofold: we expect first novels to be works of non-autobiographical genius well before a writer has had time to mature.

In the first century bc, the wrestler Nicophon of Miletus was said to have a physique which would have made Zeus himself tremble. He literally outstripped his rivals at the Olympic Games. Nicophon’s mere name, Victory Voice, announced a champion, just as that of Schwarzenegger did in the Mr Universe — and, more recently, in the Mr Governor of California — contests. He had only to flex himself for the rest of the field to wilt. Fantastic is the lid-off Arnie of Thal, an Austrian village in which his father, once of the Nazi party, was postwar police chief. Laurence Leamer’s low-down becomes a pedestal on which Arnie’s occasionally lovable hunkishness is jacked up even higher. How high can he go?