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Saturday

Anthony Mockler

All the world wondered

Every cavalryman must envy the hero of this book. Between 1936 and 1941 he led no less than five charges on horseback in Abyssinia, the final and most famous being the last cavalry charge that the British army has faced. And he survived to tell his tale. Indeed Tenente Amedeo Guillet is still living, aged 93, in Co. Meath, to which, very suitably, he retired for the hunting after a highly adventurous life, and where he still rides out. The last charge of the British cavalry was, as far as I know, in 1920, on 13 July, by the 20th Hussars - a thousand yards' successful dash against the flank of Kemal Ataturk's advancing troops in the Ismid Peninsula during the Chanak crisis.

David Hughes

Obsessive, compulsive behaviour

The young author of this survey of our childlike passion for grabbing a thing and shouting 'it's mine!' is good company, generating in easy-going prose the scholarly tensions of an auction room. He calls collecting 'Noah's task': things must not be allowed to perish. The inanimate and the humble are just as much in need of rescue as endangered species. Today Robert Opie has proved the point no less tellingly in his amassment of domestic ephemera in tin or cardboard than his parents Peter and Iona did in their collections of chapbooks, toys, rhymes. Preserving something 'beyond our random existences' is a labour of love, extending the life of the present and lending it depth.

Jane Gardam

From agony to ecstasy

This is a selection of the original letters written in the 1870s by the Victorian globe-trotter, Isabella Bird, to her younger sister, Henrietta on the Isle of Mull. They were posted from the USA, Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, China and the Malay Peninsula. Henrietta edited them, it is thought heavily, and on her brief spells at home Isabella added to them and prepared them for publication by the great travel publisher, John Murray. They all turned into best-selling travel books. Henrietta must have worked hard.

Tony Gould

Of rats and men

This racy tale of plague in the modern era focuses on two outbreaks 100 years apart: Hong Kong 1894 and Surat 1994. Edward Marriott treats the earlier outbreak as an episode of medical detection, in which two competing scientists, a famous Japanese and a less well-known Frenchman, are bent on discovering the bacillus that causes bubonic plague, and the later one as an example of what happens to people when plague strikes, how they behave in a panic situation. These parallel stories are intercalated by other actual, or narrowly averted, or potential outbreaks of plague in San Francisco, Madagascar, Japan and New York.

Digby Durrant

Fiddler on the run

This is the story of a strange and intense friendship between two orthodox Jews, one a violinist seen as the next Kreisler, the other a clever plodder who falls under his spell, almost wrecking his own life in the process. The two meet as boys just before the war. Dovdl Rapoport, called David, a refugee from Warsaw, is the musician, soon to be orphaned by the Nazis, and Martin Simmonds is the son of a concert organiser, a shrewd man who recognises David's genius by taking him into his home, paying for his education and grooming him for stardom. Things go smoothly until at Cambridge David thinks he'd prefer to be a scientist, but hearing of the death of two fellow Jews, both brilliant young violinists, he decides to honour their memory by returning to his art.