Montagu Curzon

Undeniably the Hawker Hurricane has suffered the fate of the less pretty sister. It is the Spitfire, at once beautiful and deadly, that is forever the star of 1940, firmly lodged in the British military pantheon, beside the longbow and HMS Victory, and the Hurricane is in the shadow. Yet it did more of the work, in greater numbers, and with more victories in the Battles of France and Britain. It too was loved and admired. Leo McKinstry, after his definitive books on the Spitfire and the Lancaster, sets out to repair this reputational injustice. His subtitle, ‘Victor of the Battle of Britain’, states the claim clearly.

Patrick Bishop’s much praised Fighter Boys brought new life to the story of the Battle of Britain; by analysing the backgrounds of the pilots he added a dimension of who-they-were to the well-known what-they-did. Rescued from the status of national myth, they became people again. Trying the same with Bomber Boys is harder. Flying bombers had not the same dash: Guy Gibson likened it to driving a bus. And they were many, not a Few: 125,000 passed through Bomber Command. Hardest is the highly contested reputation of the bombing offensive. Once the scale of its devastation and carnage passed the point of comparability with that suffered in England, and then rose to apocalyptic levels, there was no moral high ground left.

If ever you need to rouse a vineyard owner from vinous slumber, creep up behind him and whisper ‘Parker’. He will leap to his feet, eyes blazing, either with $ signs or with aggrieved Gallic pride. For the name of Robert M. Parker Jr is charged with electricity throughout the world of wine. His is an extraordinary story, in human and sociological as well as in wine industry terms, and here is very well told, with due verve and enthusiasm. It will fascinate anyone interested in late 20th-century developments, not only wine-lovers. Elin McCoy knows and has worked with Parker; she is a distinguished food and wine writer, and she can be critical of him. Many can’t. To his subscribers he is ‘Mr P.

Only the short-lived excitement about the Moon missions has given our age a hint of the fervour that aviation inspired in the interwar years. The new access to a whole new element gave that generation a defining identity, a sense of being incontrovertibly different from every one that had gone before, ever. A wonderful delusion that was not lost on the Western imagination. Robert Wohl charts in fascinating detail the manifold reverberations of flight, literary, political, artistic, intellectual. Much more than a plane-spotter’s feast, this is a thoughtful, wide-ranging, meticulous (as befits a history professor) analysis of arguably the most salient new fact of the time. A brilliant idea, stimulating, packed with incident.

The Battle of Hastings, 1066by M. K. Lawson Tempus, £25, pp. 252, ISBN 0752426893 The Bayeux Tapestry, nearly 75 yards long, the mother of all newsreels and the father of all strip cartoons, was embroidered at Canterbury (most probably) some years after the Conquest. With ‘626 human figures, 202 horses, 55 dogs, 505 other animals, 49 trees, 37 buildings and 41 ships’, plus as many corpses, some stripped, some in bits, as any self-respecting modern movie, and two sex scenes, it is one of the world’s great historical documents and its survival is a minor miracle. Its vivid images are stamped on our views of 1066, and on a great deal of All That.

Tim Guest spent his boyhood in the Rajneesh spiritual communes during their heyday in the 1980s when they caused countless eyebrows to rise, boomed spectacularly and bust luridly in Poona, Oregon, Suffolk, and scores of places in between. So naturally he was dressed in orange from head to toe and inside and out, wore a necklace of mala beads with the Master’s picture in the locket, and was given a Sanskrit name of spiritually encouraging meaning. Deliberately provocative, rebellious, eloquent, erudite and funny, proclaiming inexhaustible sexual freedom as the route to enlightenment, the better to shock those on the outside and to make himself universally known, Bhagwan Rajneesh was not the traditional model of the Eastern mystic.

The traditional boffin, as is well known, wore round specs and a white coat, tended to be rather bald, and was soft of speech and mild of manner whilst devising the destruction of thousands. Hammed up, he became the figure of Q, indispensable component of James Bond films; older black and whites show the genuine article. Alas, he is gone, his devices scrapped or obsolete, along with the concept of the Britain that he served. Francis Spufford has, and gives, a lot of fun arguing that a neo-boffin has appeared to take his place, following the painful demise of the manufacturing economy and the rise of what he tactfully calls ‘something else’.