Rome

Giorgia Meloni has emerged as one of the most significant politicians in Europe since she became Italy’s first female prime minister in October 2022. I Am Giorgia, already a bestseller in Italy, is her account of how a short, fat, sullen, bullied girl – as she describes her young self – from a poor, single-parent family in Rome managed to do it. Her explanation is that she refused to play the victim, and found iron in her soul – even if, as she admits, she has never found happiness. It is an amazing story: how she transformed from an ugly duckling into the swan who is now a familiar figure on the largely male-dominated world stage, and whose humour, charm, friendliness and no-nonsense talk make her such a refreshing change.

A notable recent trend in popular history is the revival of interest in the ancient world. Mary Beard, Tom Holland, Bettany Hughes and Peter Stothard are just some of the historians whose books and television series have cashed in on our thirst for knowledge of distant forebears and their civilisations. Now Owen Rees joins the merry band with a strikingly original take on the subject. He argues that our interest in classical history focuses almost entirely on the Graeco-Roman world, specifically on the capital centres of those cultures. We therefore miss much of what was going on at the periphery of empires, with their vibrant cities and peoples.

You’d think a book about a paralysed man lying in hospital for a year would be bound to be depressing. It never is. Hanif Kureishi is such an exhilarating writer that you read agog even when he’s describing having his nappies changed or fingers stuck up his bottom. It all started on Boxing Day 2022 when he was sitting watching television in his girlfriend Isabella’s flat in Rome. He wasn’t drunk, he wasn’t stoned, but suddenly he felt a bit dizzy, put his head between his knees and fell off the sofa. In doing so, he somehow broke his neck and became tetraplegic. As a result, he cannot move his arms or legs, he cannot feed himself or scratch his nose or hold a pen. If he cries, he cannot wipe away his tears.

George Orwell has a story that when Sir Walter Raleigh published the first volume of his projected history of the world while in prison, he witnessed a brawl outside his rooms in the Bloody Tower which resulted in the death of a workman. Despite diligent enquiries, Raleigh was unable to discover the cause of the quarrel. Reasoning that if he could not even ascertain the facts behind what he had observed he could hardly accurately report what had happened in distant lands centuries earlier, he burned his notes for the second volume and abandoned the entire project. No such doubts assail the 79-year-old Conrad Black, sometime proprietor of The Spectator, who, like Raleigh, has written the first of a projected three-volume global history.

The middle story in this compassionate collection follows disparate folk loosely linked by a set of steps. Among them, there’s the mother who climbs them first thing in the morning, the girl who descends them at two in the afternoon and the screenwriter who lives at the foot of them, and who stays home nearly all day. Together, these men, women and children represent a cross section of society. One comes from ‘a faraway tropical city’; another compares the grubby sight of graffiti to hearing ‘foreigners talking on the street’. Yet, here they are, existing side by side in a Roman neighbourhood, going about their ordinary daily routines. Which is what the Pulitzer Prize-winning Jhumpa Lahiri does so well: pays attention to the everyday.

In Whitehall, visible to even the most short-sighted from the gates of Downing Street, stands an outsize statue of Lord Alanbrooke, the strategic adviser to Winston Churchill during the second world war. His job was to help the prime minister see the big picture and concentrate on the decisions that really mattered. This was no easy task. Churchill was both a tricky master and ‘tinkerman’, but Alanbrooke had Ulster blood and knew how to say no. One little village, San Pietro Infine, took more than a week and 1,500 American casualties to capture He also had a remarkable facility for explaining complex strategic problems in simple terms. There is good evidence of this in the BBC archive (and on YouTube) in a television interview he gave in 1957.