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Thursday 20 July 2017

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Top 10 books of the week

The best new fiction and non-fiction books: our critics' pick of the week.

The necessity of relying on other people is the theme of Mary Midgley's new book, The Solitary Self, a slim volume written in her 92nd year. Mary Midgley’s elegant and harmonious books are a superb companion to anyone seeking “adversity’s sweet milk, philosophy”.

Love is fleeting - is the underlying theme of this collection, with most of the protagonists either enduring, escaping or destroying unsatisfactory relationships. Aphrodite's Hat is shot through with a gentle wit and a winning charm.

Born Brilliant serves as the title, but “Born Bitchy” would do just as well. In this book Williams is shown to be as pathologically selfish as he was gregarious, and as fastidious as he was filthy. Christopher Stevens has combed his stories for the authorised biography and the spectacular bile Williams reserved for his private memoirs makes it a rare one – intimate and cosily enjoyable, yet laced with the very poison its debonair subject secretly uncorked.

4 Hand Me Down World by Lloyd Jones

Jones has also lost none of his ability to convey subtly the shifting power lines between people. The novel’s readability belies its great depth. However, it’s also an uncomfortable read: the anonymity of so many of the characters speaks for us all and our primitive needs, begging the question how far we would go to get them met: pawn our teeth?

5. Green’s Dictionary of Slang by Jonathon Green | Five stars

6,000pp, Chambers, £295 t £230 (PLUS £1.25 p&p) 0844 871 1515

Green’s Dictionary of Slang is the reference work of the vulgar tongue to which all others must now be referred. Readers of BE Gent and the Profanisaurus alike will find the miniature histories it brings to their vocabulary fascinating. Green has now exhibited English slang in more detail than any lexicographer before him, and thrown it onto the bookshelves of the world.

6. Catherine of Aragon by Giles Tremlett | Five stars

Anne Boleyn – beautiful, erotic and ambitious – spent all but the last six months of her life with Henry VIII battling against a woman she never quite managed to defeat: Catherine of Aragon, Henry’s first wife.

Giles Tremlett’s enthralling biography suggests that Anne helped decide that Queen Catherine should be discreetly buried (at Peterborough Abbey) and that the priest should refer to her as a mere princess. Catherine’s only child, Mary Tudor, was spitefully forbidden to attend the funeral.

7. Heartstone by CJ Sansom - novel | Four stars

This fifth outing for the hunchbacked Tudor lawyer-sleuth Matthew Shardlake, a man with morals as upright as his body is crooked, has more plot lines than Henry VIII had wives, but Sansom is in complete control of his material and paces his yarn perfectly. Sly comments on Henry’s unwise expansionist ambitions have modern echoes, but Sansom’s own attempts at expansionism need not cause concern — you will speed through this whopper of a novel like King You-Know-Who devouring a capon.

8 A Capital Crime by Laura Wilson | Four stars

Laura Wilson specialises in depicting the ways in which horrific crime affects the lives of ordinary folk, and here she turns her attention to the ultimate man-on-the-Clapham-omnibus crime – the murders allegedly committed by John Christie. This beautifully written fictionalised version of the Christie story stands with 10 Rillington Place as a work that will make you wonder forever more about the dark, seething passions that lie behind your neighbour’s cardigan and slacks

9. The English Ghost: Spectres Through Time by Peter Ackroyd | Four stars

Different types of spectre flit in and out of fashion. There was a time in the Twenties and Thirties when one could barely visit a manor house without seeing a woman in grey. One hardly hears of that these days. In the Nineties, ghosts were out and spooky aliens were in, thanks no doubt to The X Files. And when is the last time anyone saw a headless figure?

Although little is offered by way of speculation or analysis, the overall tone of this winning compendium of “true” ghost stories seems to be one of parchment-dry amusement. Even Peter Ackroyd’s opening assertion that “the English see more ghosts than anyone else” conjures that enjoyable torch-under-chin complicity that all good ghost stories have.

10. Chasing the Sun by Richard Cohen | Four stars

The sun is a big subject, and Richard Cohen, who is a former publisher and the author of a history of swordfighting, has written a big book about it, an encyclopedic plum pudding of a compendium.

He begins by climbing Mount Fuji to watch a sunrise, and ends by watching a sunset from a boat on the Ganges at Varanasi – and in the meantime visits 16 other countries, reads hundreds of books and considers our star from every conceivable perspective, and some that are barely conceivable.

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