A.S.H. Smyth

Ole Thorstensen has been a carpenter for 25 years. A master craftsman, in fact. He is busy working on a minor job — ‘replacing a few windows, putting down decking and doing a number of other odds and ends’ — when he gets invited to bid for a loft conversion in a 19th-century apartment block in Oslo. ‘The Petersens have mentioned their desire for quality while avoiding unforeseen expense.’ No shit. The conversion will include a bedroom, bathroom and an office mezzanine and has all to be insulated, plumbed, wired, plastered, painted, floored and fitted out with furniture before a staircase can connect it to the floor below.

A feeble king and his scheming minister, a hunchback noble and the Daughters of Repentance, a botched assassination and a walled-up prisoner, some comic horse-sex, cross-dressing valets, a handful of gay jokes, a dwarf, and a literal éminence grise. The latest instalment of Game of Thrones? No, actually: a sequel to The Three Musketeers. December 1628, mere weeks after the great siege of La Rochelle, and attention has now turned to the goings-on in Italy, where France is being outmanoeuvred by Spain and the Austrian Habsburgs.

Here’s a book to make an Egyptologist of everyone. A compendium of accepted gen on the gift of the Nile, Rose-Marie and Rainer Hagen’s (updated and reissued) Egypt: People, Gods, Pharaohs ‘aims to answer some basic questions about life in Ancient Egypt and whet your appetite to find out more’, and achieves both in appropriate abundance. It looks great, reads well, even smells nice — and is positively jam-packed with wonderful things. Citing the fundamental continuity of 3,000-plus years of pharaonic culture, the Hagens tuck away a (very) concise chronology at the back of the book, and then get on with the business of showing us what Ancient Egypt looked like, and who/why/how/when/where.

In the first year or so of the Iraq occupation — or ‘big Army goatfuck’, as it is not quite specifically referred to in former US Army soldier Roy Scranton’s debut novel — three central storylines move through and around each other.

‘Missing in action is the worst state to which we can lose a human being,’ avers Commodore (Ret.) Ajith Boyagoda — and he should know. A not especially academic young chap from the hill country, Boyagoda joined the then Ceylonese navy for the glamour of it; progressed fair-to-middlingly; saw Southampton, Suez and South India; and, in September 1994, on his final voyage, found himself in command of the Sagarawardene, Sri Lanka’s biggest warship, on the night that it was sunk by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.

Early last month I tripped on up to the British Library for the 'Magna Carta Unification Event'. Manuscripts had been choppered in from Salisbury, Lincoln, and indeed (x2) from the British Library’s own collection. It was my chance to catch 'all four surviving original 1215 Magna Carta Manuscripts in one place for the first time’. Now, I don’t have any strongly-held views on how you pull out all the stops when it comes to exhibiting a handful of 800-year-old documents.