MUSTREADS

Out now in paperback

FOXES UNEARTHED by Lucy Jones (Elliott & Thompson £9.99)

‘NO OTHER creature in Britain has provoked or inspired more column inches, literary characters, pop culture symbols, parliamentary hours, lyrics, album covers, cartoons, nicknames, pub names, cushion covers, Facebook fights, demonstrations, words and sheer cortisol than the fox,’ writes Lucy Jones.

You are as likely to see one mooching along an urban pavement as whisking along a field — the fox population of London is estimated to be around 10,000 — and they have haunted the human imagination for millennia, immortalised in Greek legend, in the constellation Canis minor and in the satirical Twitter account, Gus the Fox.

And Jones’s own affection for them is evident on every page.

BYRON’S WOMEN by Alexander Larman (Head of Zeus £9.99)

LADY Caroline Lamb, with whom Lord Byron had a destructive love affair, said he was ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’.

It is an opinion with which many of the women in the poet’s life would have agreed, particularly his long- suffering mother, Catherine, his abused wife, Annabella, his abandoned mistress Claire Clairmont (who was Shelley’s sisterin-law) and his own halfsister, Augusta, who was probably the love of Byron’s life and whose daughter, Elizabeth, may well have been his child.

Dashing, scandalous and irresistibly attractive, Byron would have been shocked to find himself not the main subject of Larman’s narrative, but relegated to a supporting role in the remarkable stories of the significant women in his life.

THE ALIENS ARE COMING by Ben Miller (Sphere £8.99)

‘IS THERE any question more fascinating than whether or not we are alone in the universe?

Is it really possible that Earth is the only habitable planet and that we are the only intelligent species?

And if there is intelligent life out there, might we be able to communicate with it? The comedian and actor Ben Miller is unexpectedly well qualified to explore the questions that he raises on extra-terrestrial life.

He studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge University and began a PhD in solid state physics, before abandoning it to make a career telling jokes.

His two interests combine to entertaining effect in this voyage of discovery around the universe.

As he points out, Nasa’s recent Kepler mission has discovered that planets like ours are common throughout the galaxy, ‘so our first encounter with alien life is rapidly approaching’.