MUSTREADS

Out now in paperback

FOR THE GLORY: THE LIFE OF ERIC LIDDELL by Duncan Hamilton

(Black Swan £9.99) AT THE end of the 1981 film Chariots Of Fire, which celebrates the triumph of British runners at the 1924 Paris Olympics, a stark message appears: ‘ Eric Liddell, missionary, died in occupied China at the end of World War II. All of Scotland mourned.’

The story behind that enigmatic epitaph is told in Hamilton’s bestselling biography of Liddell.

While Ian Charleson’s film performance unforgettably conveyed Liddell’s gentleness and unshakeable Christian faith, Hamilton’s vivid book reveals that these qualities informed every aspect of his life, from his devoted love for his wife, Florence, and their three daughters, to his courageous work in China.

There, cruelty against missionaries and the native population were common, and we read of his heroic efforts to comfort his fellow inmates at the Japanese internment camp at Weihsien, where he died of a brain tumour aged just 43.

A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE HEDGEROW by John Wright

(Profile £9.99) MOST people who live in towns, John Wright suggests, think about hedges no more than a couple of times a year when, returning from a holiday, they look out the aircraft window and see an extraordinary patchwork of green and gold, separated by thin lines of darker green — the fields and hedgerows of home.

The history of our field boundaries — not just hedges, but hurdles, fences and dry stone walls — is ancient and intriguing.

The grubbing- up of hedges by farmers, so often lamented by nature-lovers, is only the latest event in a cycle of planting and eradicating that goes back to Neolithic times.

After reading this delightful book, you’ll see those humble boundaries as living archives of our island story.

NO NEED FOR GENIUSES by Steve Jones

(Abacus £10.99) LATE 18thcentury France was a place of political turmoil and scientific ferment.

In his entertaining history of the remarkable discoveries and innovations of the time, Professor Steve Jones writes: ‘The nation’s literature and music were rather in eclipse . . . Instead, science became the language of intellectual life.’

Technical advances in every field were made by scientists such as the mathematician Nicolas de Condorcet and the aristocratic chemist and politician Antoine Lavoisier.

Alas, the life of the latter, and many others, would be ended by the brainchild of another prominent figure of the time — the physician and anatomist (and opponent of the death penalty), Joseph-Ignace Guillotin.

A diverting guide to the history of science in the City of Light.