Botswana

Almost two decades ago, Jared Diamond cemented his international reputation with Guns, Germs and Steel, which argued that geography and environment rather than racial differences shaped the rise and conquest of nations. Still going strong at 88, he has now written a book on leadership. This is a crowded literary space, but Diamond offers a distinctive approach. A distinguished biologist and polymath, he has little time for the Great Man theory of history popularised by the 19th--century essayist Thomas Carlyle. Altogether too subjective, he says, never mind the absence of women. Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace is no better a guide, since it casts individuals as constrained by circumstance, with scant influence over events.

Naomi Mitchison is now renowned for being the author of ‘lost classics’ – famous for being forgotten. She lived to be 101 and wrote nearly as many books. She supported anti-Nazi movements in 1930s Vienna, ran a sexual health centre for women, became an octogenarian campaigner for nuclear disarmament and an ‘adviser and mother of the Bakgatla tribe in Botswana’. Despite two biographies and attempts to revive her masterpiece, The Corn King and the Spring Queen, she remains undervalued – perhaps because of her refusal to settle into one genre and her determination to venture into the territory of historical epic spiced with mythic ritual and dark magic. Travel Light was originally published in 1952 as a children’s book.