MUSTREADS

Out now in paperback

SPITALFIELDS by Dan Cruickshank

(Windmill £12.99) LONDON is a city of innumerable villages, but the area of East London known as Spitalfields is an urban village with a particularly dramatic past.

Historian Dan Cruickshank, who lives there, notes that a remarkable number of people who played a key role in the development of British culture are associated with Spitalfields: Shakespeare and Marlowe, architect Nicholas Hawksmoor and artists Gilbert & George and Tracey Emin, among many others.

Its raffish vitality is derived from the area’s long history of embracing immigrants, from 18th-century French Huguenots to the Bangladeshis whose restaurants line Brick Lane.

There are darker tales, too: Jack the Ripper stalked these streets, Oswald Mosley’s fascists marched through them and the Kray brothers terrorised them.

But Cruickshank warns that the greatest threat to Spitalfields comes from the ever-encroaching march of tower blocks.

STORM IN A TEACUP by Helen Czerski

(Black Swan £8.99) LIVING near a river, as I do, there is a question that has always troubled me: why don’t waterfowl suffer from cold feet in winter? Helen Czerski supplies the answer in her entertaining book on the scientific phenomena of everyday life.

The explanation involves heat transfer — the physiology of ducks is ingeniously adapted to ensure the blood that reaches their feet is a similar temperature to the water around them.

Once you start to think like this, the familiar world turns out to be a place full of intriguing mysteries.

Czerski produces a funny, readable book that makes you view your surroundings quite differently.

OF FORTUNES AND WAR by Patrick Garrett

(Two Roads £10.99) FROM Kate Adie and Marie Colvin to Janine di Giovanni and Orla Guerin, the list of female war reporters is long and distinguished. But the great- grandmother of them all was Clare Hollingworth, who died earlier this year at the age of 105.

Her father was interested in military history, and childhood visits to battlefields captured Clare’s imagination.

Her formal education ended at 16, followed by a stint at domestic science college, but what fascinated Clare was adventure and, in 1939, she found it.

Three days into her first job in journalism, she got the scoop of the century when she reported the massing of German tanks on the Polish border.

This biography by Clare’s great-nephew is a lively account of a formidable woman who believed that living dangerously was the secret of her longevity.