Andrew Roberts

Melvyn Bragg’s superb new history of the English language is told as an adventure story, and rightly so. Brought to the British Isles in the 5th century AD by Germanic warriors, ‘this hungry creature, English, demanded more and more subjects’, until today, with 1.5 billion speakers, it is poised for global domination. Nearly strangled first by the Danes and then by the Normans, its special genius is for morphing its enemies into itself, like some monstrous sci-fi extra-terrestrial growing ever stronger by gobbling up its opponents’ tongues.

Michael Dobbs is a charming, intelligent and self-effacing man, but you would not have guessed it from the blurb on the dust-jacket of his latest political thriller. 'Michael Dobbs always makes an impact,' it tells us. He has worked with prime ministers, written about kings, and always seems to be in the right spot at vital moments in history. His experiences have led him to be described as a man who, in Latin America, would have been shot. How can he possibly have approved this guff? Winston's War has an intriguing plot, based on the real-life meeting between Guy Burgess and Winston Churchill at Chartwell at the time of the Munich crisis. It uses suspense well, as Dobbs managed so successfully in his House of Cards trilogy.