MUSTREADS

Out now in paperback

DIARY OF A WARTIME AFFAIR by Doreen Bates

(Penguin £9.99) DOREEN BATES was born on April 25, 1906, and grew up in Tooting, South London.

She went to Croydon High School, then studied history at London University. As part of a new generation of independent young career women, she worked as a civil servant at the Inland Revenue — and it was here that she fell in love with an older, married colleague, William Evans (‘E’).

Throughout her long life, Doreen kept a diary, in which the remarkable story of her affair with ‘E’ is chronicled.

She was a natural writer, with the rare ability to observe and capture intense emotions.

Edited by the twins (now grandparents themselves) who were born of the affair, this is a captivating and intimate account of the life of a clever, brave and sensitive woman. I CONTAIN MULTITUDES (Vintage £8.99) IN ONE of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy stories, an old scientist peers through a microscope at a drop of water, and sees magnified there a host of little creatures, living lives as busy, turbulent and dramatic as those of human beings.

As Ed Yong demonstrates here in his bestselling account of the microbes that have swarmed over the face of the Earth for the past few billion years, Andersen’s vision was far from fanciful.

Microbes are not just all around us, they are inside us. ‘Even when we are alone, we are never alone,’ he writes. ‘Every one of us is a zoo in our own right.’

If this sounds alarming, Yong’s enthusiasm for bacteria is infectious, as he describes the beauty of luminescent bacteria in the Hawaiian bobtail squid and the benefits of our microscopic neighbours.

PAX ROMANA by Adrian Goldsworthy

(W&N £9.99) ‘ LIKE most imperial powers,’ writes historian Adrian Goldsworthy, ‘the Romans felt that their domination was entirely right, divinely ordained and a good thing for the wider world.’

This view was not, of course, universally shared.

At the end of the first century, the Roman historian Tacitus records a Caledonian war leader telling his men that the Romans ‘create a desolation and call it peace’.

The reality, as chronicled by Goldsworthy, is somewhere between those two extremes.

To some of its territories, Roman rule brought generations of peace, yet millions died or were enslaved by their ruthless aggression.

Goldsworthy’s lively and thought-provoking history gives a vivid impression of Roman peace from the point of view of both the conquerers and those conquered.