Also on the bookshelf
WORDS BY RHIANNON DAVIES & MATT ELTON
FICTION
Lion
by Conn Iggulden
Michael Joseph, 400 pages, £20
Conn Iggulden is no stranger to the ancient world, having written best-sellers set in Rome and Sparta. In Lion he revisits Greece, this time following the fortunes of Pericles, famous statesman of Athens. The action sees Athenian soldiers fighting shoulder to shoulder with the Spartans to take on the forces of the mighty Persians, but trouble is brewing between the allies – threatening to boil over into all-out war.
CULTURAL
Five Love Affairs and a Friendship
by Anne de Courcy
W&N, 336 pages, £22
With her kohl-ringed eyes and scarlet slash of lipstick, Nancy Cunard captured the hearts and minds of a string of creatives, from the poet Ezra Pound to the novelist Aldous Huxley. Here Anne de Courcy delves into five of Cunard’s formative affairs as well as her enduring friendship with her mother’s lover, George Moore, and in so doing paints a tantalising picture of glamorous lives in 1920s Paris.
ENTERTAINMENT
The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures
by Paul Fischer
Faber & Faber, 416 pages, £20
American inventor Thomas Edison looms large in the history of motion pictures but in fact Louis Le Prince pipped him to the post, filming the first-ever moving picture sequence in 1888. Two years after finessing his invention, though, the Frenchman boarded a train in his homeland and disappeared. The events that followed read like a wild whodunnit, with his family pointing fingers at none other than… Thomas Edison.
FICTION
Privilege
by Guinevere Glasfurd
Two Roads, 352 pages, £18.99
Mid-18th-century France was a place of opulence and anger, where radical authors keen to circulate their incendiary views were forced to dodge royal censors and spies. Teenager Delphine Vimond is thrust into this shadowy world, meeting an apprentice printer named Chancery Smith who’s been tasked with sniffing out the identity of an anonymous author who’s penned dangerous papers.
SOCIAL
The Women Who Saved the English Countryside
by Matthew Kelly
Yale, 400 pages, £20
This joint biography profiles four women who reshaped access to, and attitudes towards, England’s countryside. Octavia Hill co-founded the National Trust, of which Beatrix Potter was a key benefactor; Pauline Dower shaped England’s system of national parks; and Sylvia Sayer used political pressure to save her beloved Dartmoor. This is an inspiring look at connections between people, place and period.
SEXUALITY
Bi: The Hidden Culture, History and Science of Bisexuality
by Julia Shaw
Canongate Books, 272 pages, £16.99
Bisexual erasure – the tendency for the identities and existence of bi people to be overlooked or misunderstood in popular culture and academic discourse – remains an issue, despite the strides made in the acceptance of LGBTQ people in recent decades. This lively book aims to put that right, exploring the changing ways in which bisexuality has been understood, and figures who deserve to be better known.
SOCIAL
Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet
by Carl H Nightingale
Cambridge University Press, 300 pages, £25
As well as changing individual lives, the rise of cities also created revolutionary new possibilities by bringing together a mass of people in a small space. That’s one of the arguments made in this epic look at our “urban planet”, from ancient settlements to today’s metropolises. Along the way, it also charts the negative consequences of city life: social inequality, power imbalances and environmental damage.
TECHNOLOGY
The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is
by Justin EH Smith
Princeton University Press, 208 pages, £20
This heady, unusual book sets out to view the internet – idealistic experiment, revolutionary communication tool, repository of amusing cat memes – through a longer conceptual history. Instead of the expected trips to research laboratories and US university campuses, there are detours via Buddhist thought and a 19th-century hoax involving a “snail telegraph”. Idiosyncratic, fascinating stuff.