NON-FICTION
MI5 AND ME by Charlotte Bingham (Bloomsbury £14.99)
WITH her late husband, Terence Brady, Charlotte Bingham wrote for television series including upstairs, downstairs and No, Honestly and she has also written more than 30 novels on her own: a life well led.
But, nearly 60 years ago, as a ditsy teenager, she also spent a brief, but memorable, time at MI5. Her father — a notable spook who was one of the role models for George Smiley — got her the job to try to calm her down and turn her into a sensible person.
Happily, this failed and, instead, we have this wonderful comic memoir, the sort of light, frothy book that makes you laugh out loud on public transport.
The miracle is that Bingham, now 76, can still write utterly convincingly as an adolescent. as her erstwhile boss says, she has the perfect cover to be a spy: ‘No one in their right mind would ever suspect you to be any more than a pretty young popsy.’
Maybe, but what a talented young popsy — with a ferociously long memory.
REBEL PRINCE by Tom Bower (Collins £20)
BoWEr is the fearless investigative reporter who has filleted and kippered robert Maxwell, richard Branson and Tiny rowland.
He is fascinated by power and the way it corrupts, so this is by no means a bland and deferential biography of Prince Charles.
Charles emerges as wilful, autocratic and not fond of people who say ‘no’ to him. He spends far more time worrying about what the Press is saying than someone who actually reads a newspaper does.
He’s also hyper- sensitive, tortured and, in his weird and wonderful way, a force for good.
His rehabilitation in public affection, it becomes clear, is almost entirely due to Camilla, who is every bit as sensible and down-to-earth as you suspected.
The sheer weight of Bower’s research — 120 people interviewed — is extraordinary and, although he has a permanent sneer, my, can he tell a story. a rip-roaring read.
A SPY NAMED ORPHAN: THE ENIGMA OF DONALD MACLEAN by Roland Philipps (Bodley Head £20)
IT WaS the spy writer Ben Macintyre who told his publisher friend roland Philipps that there was no really good biography of donald Maclean, the quietest and least well known of the British spytraitors of the Fifties and Sixties.
So Philipps set about writing it. The result is elegant, thorough and surprisingly exciting, given these events happened 60 years ago and we know all about them anyway.
What’s fascinating is that Maclean and the others did not fall into spying willy-nilly, but were doomed by their temperaments and upbringing into betraying their country.
Maclean’s russian contact ‘otto’ noted four desirable characteristics for a successful agent: ‘an inherent class resentfulness, a predilection for secretiveness, a yearning to belong, and an infantile appetite for praise and reassurance.’ Guess who had all four?
The grand, arrogant folly of it all still resonates down the decades — this book records it admirably.
THE WOOD by John Lewis-Stempel (Doubleday £14.99)
TWICE winner of the Wainwright Prize for nature writing, the prolific lewis-Stempel prefers the term ‘countryside writer’, saying: ‘I give the view of the countryside from someone who works there.’
For four years, he owned, ran and adored a small wood and, here, he writes about a single year in the life of that wood, day by day. ‘No one goes to a wood for conviviality,’ he writes. ‘a wood is a place for solitude, sanctuary. In a wood, the only things you should meet are abundant nature and antique tranquillity, the present and past tenses combined.’
It’s a mesmerisingly good book, imbued with an enviable calmness. as it happens, I was reading it on a bench in my local park when a pigeon pooed on my head. It seemed only appropriate.
NOT THE WHOLE STORY by Angela Huth (Constable £20)
I’d heard of Huth, whose 14 novels include one on which the film The land Girls was based, but had never read her before. obviously, I have been missing something.
This memoir is, as she says, ‘not the whole story, but it’s all I’m prepared to tell’.
So, while extreme intimacy is avoided, there are many brilliant tales to be told from an incidentpacked life, lived on the cusp of journalism, high society and what one might call posh poverty, where no one has any cash, but everyone lives in huge houses.
Now pushing 80, Huth has what every aspiring writer most desires: a distinctive voice, dry, witty and utterly clear-eyed.
She also has a lifelong fear of dolls and hates the words ‘shouty’, ‘portion’ and ‘stylish’. and, while she warns in the introduction that she won’t drop names, down they all come with a mighty clang in the final third of the book. lovely stuff.
SECRET PIGEON SERVICE by Gordon Corera (Collins £20)
arE there any untold stories of World War II? I wouldn’t have thought so either, but Gordon Corera, BBC security correspondent, has chanced upon a beauty.
The Secret Pigeon Service dropped homing pigeons in their thousands on Belgium in the hope that Belgian resistance fighters would find them and send back intelligence of German installations and troop movements.
Bonkers, surely, but that’s exactly what happened, at a point when intelligence behind enemy lines was otherwise poor and very slow. This was good and very quick.
The Germans, blast them, used hawks to eat the brave pigeons and we trained our own hawks to eat German pigeons that we suspected of coming over here and spying for them.
Corera writes all this with great authority and deadpan humour, but pity the poor, brave pigeons: tens of thousands were dropped, but only one in ten made it back.