MUSTREADS

Out now in paperback

WAR AND THE DEATH OF NEWS by Martin Bell

(Oneworld £9.99) ‘THE trouble with you, Corporal Bell, is that you think too much,’ said an exasperated senior officer to Private Bell of the Suffolk Regiment.

‘I did then, and I do now,’ retorts Martin Bell in his forthright memoir.

Bell comes from military and literary stock, and he found National Service an ideal training ground for a war reporter.

He began his war correspondent career in Vietnam — the start of many decades spent telling harrowing stories from the most dangerous places on Earth.

Eventually, he writes, he ‘rather wished to become a peace correspondent’.

He has harsh things to say about the ‘fluff’ of current journalism, and is resoundingly against make-up for male reporters.

He and his colleague Sandy Gall, he notes with pride, were once described as having faces like relief maps of the conflict zones from which they were reporting.

LIFE IN THE GARDEN by Penelope Lively

(Penguin £9.99) AMONG its charms, this book surely has the prettiest jacket of the year.

‘The two central activities in my life — alongside writing — have been reading and gardening,’ the 84- year- old Booker Prize-winning author Penelope Lively pens, in her compendium of writing about gardens, and particularly those she has loved.

The earliest was the Egyptian one of her childhood — an intimate paradise, long since swallowed up by Cairo’s urban sprawl, where her mother created an English haven in which Penelope read Swallows and Amazons.

Then there was the ambitious Oxfordshire plot she made with her late husband, Jack, and now a small London patch where she pursues ‘oldage gardening’.

THE DUN COW RIB by John Lister-Kaye

(Canongate £7.99) ON A crisp January day some 40 years ago, John Lister-Kaye discovered Aigas, an abandoned Victorian mansion in the Scottish Highlands. The house wa s condemned, but ListerKaye was charmed by the ruin: ‘it had somehow entered my blood’.

He bought it, and turned it into a field studies centre — an unheard-of notion back then, and one regarded with derision.

Lister- Kaye’s love of nature began in early childhood, when he roamed free in the woods and fields surrounding the family home, a 17thcentury manor house in Warwickshire.

His blissful early years ended when his mother fell ill and he was sent to boarding school, aged five.

After leaving, he followed his parents’ wishes and took up a miserable job as a management trainee.

But the call of the wild was too strong, and this lovely memoir reveals how Lister-Kaye found his way back to nature — his first love.