Culture

Those who prefer their history straight may look askance at the historical novel, particularly if it is military. Accuracy is all. Surely it was the 31st Foot rather than the 38th and was the rifle yet in service and when did the Iron Duke say that it had been a really, really close-run thing? But Alan Mallinson's reputation rests on authenticity, for he is a serving soldier who has commanded a cavalry regiment. It is cavalry of the four-legged, rather than the tracked, sort that he has made his own in fiction and soon one has settled into regimental life, albeit in the early 19th century and, in this case, on the muddy river banks of Burma and the dusty plains of Hindoostan.

Assuming that a biography is worth writing in the first place, it is often asserted that after 20 years or so another look at the same subject is justified. It is nearly 20 years now since Selina Hastings's subtle and perceptive account of Nancy Mitford appeared; and so even if the heart sank at the thought of revisiting Mitford country - the Hons' cupboard, the 'sewers', the shrieks, 'do tell' - it seemed only fair to approach this new book about her in a positive, hopeful spirit. After all, it was possible, if not very likely given the assiduous cultivation in recent years of the Mitford literary estate, that Laura Thompson had found some new material, or at least scanned the old material with fresh eyes. Unfortunately, the heart sinks further within the first two or three pages.

Short stories are best read one a night just before you go to sleep, and this collection by Angela Huth, which brings together work from the last 30 years, would keep you going for nearly a month.

'The Age of Russia,' according to the doom-fraught speculations Oswald Spengler published in 1918, would succeed 'the Decline of the West'. For a while, it looked as if he was right. Russia's non-western credentials became part of the rhetoric of Soviet foreign policy. Hailed as 'the future which works', Russia was earnestly copied by escapers from colonialism, who wanted their newly independent countries to break with the West and bask in the 'white heat' of red technology. It was all illusory. Russia never offered an antidote to western-style modernity, just a variant of it. Now Russians sheepishly avow that they never really left the western fold.